The Green Calash
date: label: Date made
content: 1925
notes: label: Description
content: "The Green Calash" is a soft ground color etching and aquatint by Ellen Day Hale (1855&#8211;1940), produced in 1925 after her 1904 painting. The print is a three-quarter-view portrait of a young woman seated with her hands resting together in her lap. She is wearing a large green bonnet or hood called a calash because of its resemblance to the folding top of an 18th-century carriage known as a calash.
label: Description
content: "The Green Calash" was shown at the Smithsonian as part of a print exhibition in November 1936. Other exhibitors were Gabrielle DeVeaux Clements, Margaret Hoyt, and Lesley Jackson. Clements and Hale experimented extensively with color printmaking throughout their careers. They were especially inspired by French artist Ren&#233 Ligeron's 1924 treatise on color intaglio, which Hale translated into English for the Smithsonian exhibition. Clements wrote to curator R.P. Tolman that she and Hale had "been working on an interesting line of experiments in printing etchings in color" and that they had "lately gained better control of the medium, and greater simplicity."
label: Description
content: The 1936 exhibition came near the end of Hale's and Clements's careers. By that time they had been producing prints for more than sixty years. Their work was included in the first exhibition of etchings exclusively by women at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1887. Curator Sylvester R. Koehler included more than 400 etchings by twenty-five artists in a very successful exhibition titled <I>Women Etchers of America</I>. In 1888 the Union League Club in New York exhibited the same works, plus about 100 more by eleven additional women. A traveling exhibition celebrating the centennial of these two ground-breaking shows, <I>American Women of the Etching Revival</I>, was organized by the High Museum in Atlanta, Georgia in 1988. The NMAH lent works by Hale, Clements, and other women printmakers, and the Museum showed the exhibition in Washington in 1989.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
setName: label: See more items in
content: Work and Industry: Graphic Arts
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content: Clothing & Accessories
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content: Communications
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content: Art
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: GA.17165
label: catalog number
content: 17165
label: accession number
content: 142035
objectType: label: Object Name
content: Print
label: Object Type
content: Etching
label: Other Terms
content: Print; Intaglio; Etching
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: paper (overall material)
label: Physical Description
content: ink (overall material)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 14 in x 8 1/2 in; 35.56 cm x 21.59 cm