Nannie Huddle (1860-1951), Bluebonnets, Austin, oil

Nannie Huddle (1860-1951), Bluebonnets, Austin, Texas, oil on board, 12 x 16", frame: 15.5 x 19.5"

Nannie Carver Huddle was born in Mobile, Alabama in 1860. When she was a girl her family moved to Austin, where she attended St. Mary's Academy. There she received her first art lessons from a nun who arranged for her work to be critiqued by William Henry Huddle, a painter of historical scenes and portraits who moved to Austin in 1876. Huddle told her to paint a flower "so that it seems that you can reach around it," advice she later credited as the most influential on her style. Nannie and Huddle were married ten years later, at which time Nannie temporarily gave up painting. In the early 1900s spent several years in New York City, where she studied at the Art Students League, which her husband had helped to establish, and with William Merritt Chase, Wayman Adams, and Marshall Troy. She also studied with T. S. Frackelton in Chicago. She exhibited her work for the first time during this period, and then returned to Austin with a growing reputation as a painter. Nannie Huddle became a close friend and the sole pupil of Elisabet Ney, with whom she studied sculpture from 1903 until Ney's death in 1907.

Huddle is credited as one of the first in the state to paint fields of bluebonnets and, as a wildflower painter, helped to establish a genre that was further developed by San Antonio painter Julian Onderdonk and popularized by the Edgar B. Davis wildflower competitions of 1927-29, sponsored at the Witte Museum by Davis and the San Antonio Art League. Dimensions: