page_title: Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones
section_title: Early career
hierarchical_section_title: Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones / Career / Early career
context_page_description: Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones was an American painter who lived in New York City, Philadelphia, and Paris, France. She had a successful career as a painter at the turn of the century, exhibiting her works internationally and winning awards. She had a mental breakdown that caused a break in her career, and she returned to have a successful second career, creating modern watercolor paintings. She was a resident at three artist colonies, with notable artists, writers, and musicians. Sparhawk-Jones' works are in American art museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Museum of Modern Art.
context_section_description: Sparhawk-Jones was supporting herself through the sales of her oil and watercolor paintings by the time she was eighteen. She painted scenes of women reading or shopping as well as mothers and children walking through a park. Her Impressionist works, known for their vivid colors, were exhibited internationally in 1908, like the Carnegie Institute's international exhibition where she was the only woman to win anything and the only artist from the United States to receive an honorable mention. That year, The New York Times called her "the find of the year", having found her painting The Porch to be the "most unforgettable canvas" in the exhibition that they reviewed. Her use of color and expressive brush strokes were compared by art critics to William Merritt Chase's style.
  She exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and in 1908 and 1912 was awarded the Mary Smith Prize. The 1908 prize was won for Roller Skates and the 1912 prize was won for a painting of a flower shop in Paris entitled In the Spring, noted for its radiant colors. Sparhawk-Jones's portrait, painted by Alice Kent Stoddard before 1911, is in the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
  Shoe Shop, which she painted in 1911, captures the chaotic shopping excursions of the cosmopolitan New Women of the 20th century. This is compared to the more sedate painting by William Glackens entitled The Shoppers (1907). Both paintings, though, capture wealthy women who have a new-found interest in shopping in the city, evidenced by the crowded figures in the paintings. The Journal of the American Medical Association, which used Shoe Shop as its March 24, 1999 cover, described Sparhawk-Jones as "witty, spirited, and talented". She received positive critical attention for her paintings, but Sparhawk-Jones did not enjoy and avoided promoting her work.
  Her painting Shop Girls c. 1912 was exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago as part of an intention to pick "eye-popping" or "little masterpieces of compactness and stimulation" from American artists' works of the late 19th century and early 20th-century. Now in the Art Institute's collection, Shop Girls was the first woman's painting bought by the Friends of American Art of the Art Institute. It was purchased in 1913 from Sparhawk-Jones for $550. Women's paintings were not generally as revered as paintings by men, which could fetch several thousands of dollars per painting at that time. The painting was made into a poster in the 1980s by the New York Department of Labor, which had the following quotation:
  Over the years, radically different images have helped to shape America's ever changing view of the world of work. Perhaps nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in the mixed signals America has sent to working women throughout our history. "Shop Girls," painted in 1912, is representative of the last vestiges of Victorian America. The reality for many working women in the early 20th century was confinement to jobs where they were routinely exploited—especially those who worked in mills and factories up to 70 hours a week for three dollars or less.
  Around the time "Shop Girls" was being painted, 154 workers, mostly young women, died in the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire of 1911 in New York City...
  
  The history of America's working women is a history of the advocacy of sharing, the right to vote, the right to unionize, the welfare of children and the extension of human rights to all. Despite the obstacles, despite the stereotypes imposed by society, theirs is a revolution still in the making.
  — New York Department of Labor poster
caption: Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones, Shoe Shop, 1911
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