RENOWNED ARTIST ALBERTA KINSEY
by Katherine Lollar Rowland

Although Alberta Kinsey was primarily noted as a renowned painter of New Orleans,  her art career began in southwest Ohio. The child of David J. and Lydia A. Warner Kinsey,Alberta was born in the 1870s at West Milton, in Miami County, Ohio, some twenty miles northwest of metropolitan Dayton. She was in her late forties and had  already begun her formal art instruction at the  Cincinnati  Art Academy and her own teaching career in Miami County schools and at the college level in Lebanon University  and Wilmington College. before she moved from Ohio to Louisiana.

My husband, Elden Rowland, and I first met Alberta  in the winter of 1945-46, in New Orleans, although we, too, had originated in southwest Ohio.  Elden was working as a commercial artist  in Cincinnati when we were married in 1939 but that was soon to be replaced by a job making parts for tanks during the World War II years. When V-J Day on August 15, 1945, released him from that work, we purchased a trailer and started to travel the country while we followed his long-held dream of becoming a fine artist.

Drawn by New Orleans’ reputation as an art colony - much of it fostered by Alberta Kinsey herself after she arrived there some thirty years before - Elden and I soon made our way to that magnetic city. Elden immediately began to draw and paint the  picturesque streets of The  Vieux  Carre (the fabled French Quarter).  One day,  through a local art store, Elden received a message that a Miss Alberta Kinsey would like
him to visit her at her home at 823 Royal Street.

Thus, through one of her many gestures toward helping a young art student, we met Alberta  Kinsey, widely reputed for her paintings of magnolia blossoms, and courtyards and  New Orleans street scenes.  But her usual enthusiastic welcome  of all possible converts to her beloved Fernch Quarter was even more expansive this time when she learned that I was originally from Lebanon, Ohio, where she had spent ten happy
 years teaching art at the National Normal School.  After the Normal School closed in 1916 Alberta taught briefly at Wilmington College but then decided she wanted to do something more adventurous.  Later newspaper articles tell the picturesque story of her arrival in New Orleans with “a camp stool, an easel, canvas, paints, and some clothes - and practically nothing else.”

Soon after Alberta went to New Orleans she became actively associated with Ellsworth and William Woodward, leaders at the newly-established Newcomb Art School in New Orleans, as well as the Isaac Delgado Museum of Art (today the New Orleans Museum of Art) and also in international art circles.  And Alberta soon went on to become a recognized member of those same circles.  The Vieux Carre Commission History  says about the 1920s:  “Artists,writers and other intellectuals settled in the Quarter’s neighborhoods during the early 1920s.  There were . . . grand, grand people. The celebrated Sherwood Anderson and the as-yet uncelebrated William Faulkner, along with with locals such as Lyle Saxon, John McClure,  . . Alberta Kinsey, and William Woodward formed the core of a Bohemian group. “

Alberta  painted constantly and her work became popular. She was able to buy one of the French Quarter “half-houses” and take two painting/study trips to Europe. In addition to the winters of 1945-46-47 when the Rowlands saw Alberta in New Orleans, we also saw her on one of her painting study trips. It came about as a joyous surprise, the summer of 1946, which Elden and I spent on Cape Cod so he could study in North Truro with Jerry Farnsworth, and ran into her as we were walking along the street in Provincetown, the famous art colony at the tip of the Cape. Alberta had gone there to spend the summer studying with Hans Hofmann, one of the country’s foremost abstract-expressionist painters.

Elden and I were impressed that an artist so well established as a painter of traditional landscapes and still lifes and Franch Quarter street scenes would want to travel 2000 miles to study with such an avant garde painter. She was gracious and encouraging, as always, to young artists when we took some of the students from the Farnsworth School to Provincetown to see her and when we brought her to North Truro for supper in our trailer.  We were both  pleased when she complimented Elden on the improvement in his painting, and I was especially thrilled when she said she liked the supper, saying how good it seemed to be able to have “Ohio cooking” again.

In New Orleans Alberta continued to grow in the affection and respect of her fellow citizens.  She was voted  one of the “most outstanding women in New Orleans,” according to one report, at least ten times. She taught classes at the Delgado Art Museum.

She remained high in the esteeem of the Rowlands, too, and we enjoyed many occasions together. Since she did not have a car we were able to take her to art exhibitions and on sketching trips to the bayou country west of New Orleans. In the winter of 1946-47 she was in charge of a temporarily unoccupied school building and arranged for Elden to use it as a studio on days when the weather turned cold and rainy.

In March of 1947, Elden and I met my parents, Harry and Ruby Lollar, in New Orleans for a short visit so we could show them the sights of the city we had grown to love so much. And, of course, took them to visit Alberta Kinsey. As we expected , she had countless questions to ask them relating to the time she had spent in Lebanon teaching. As it turned out, my mother had attended the university in 1911, the same time Alberta was teaching there, but I don’t think my mother took any art lessons.
An entry from my journal from that visit to New Orleans:
“On March 17, 1947, we decided to drive to Des Allemandes, picturesque bayou town west of the Mississippi River, and went down to see if Miss Kinsey wanted to go but she was busy superintending workmen putting a new gallery on her house so we said ‘goodbye’to her until we see her again. . .” And that was our last “good buye.” In the winter of 1948 we followed Jerry Farnsworth to Sarasota, Florida, and built our home there so didn’t go back to New Orleans. And Alberta never spent another sumer in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

One colorful part of the Alberta Kinsey story relates to her connection with Clementine Hunter, the famous primitive painter who became the first African American to have a solo exhibit at the New Orleans Museum of Art. It all began at Melrose Plantation, a 200-year-old cotton and pecan plantation on the banks of Cane River Lake, near Natchitoches, inland in northwest Louisiana. Handed down by a series of owners in the same family, by the 1920s it became the home of John Hampton and Cammie Garret Henry. In a “Travel-Wise” website entitled “the Lure ofLouisiana” Linda Aksomitis states:
“A patron of the arts, ‘Miss Cammie’ invited artists and writers to stay on the Plantation, providing they were working on a creative project. Over the years, she was host to such creators as: Lyle Saxon, Francis Parkinson Keyes, Alberta Kinsey, Tennesee Williams and William Faulkner.” Her art colony became one of the most popular in the South.

 At the end of one stay at Melrose Plantation, Alberta left her paints and brushes behind and Clementine Hunter found them.  Clementine had moved to Melrose Plantation in 1902 when she was 15 years old and worked as a field hand picking cotton. She didn’t go to school, so she never learned to read or write.  By the 1920s she had moved into the house
working as a cook and so found Alberta’s paints and began her road to fame. One is tempted to conjecture about whether Alberta left the painting materials by accident or intent. My conlucsion would be that she left them on purpose, knowing how excited Clementine would be to have them.

Alberta’s own fame, considerable during her lifetime, has increased since her death in 1952. A canvas entitled “Plantation Home,” is offered by Taylor Clark Gallery on their website in January of 2007 at $15,000. Photographs of many others may be seen by “surfing the Web.”

No such amazing increase in value has occurred to any of my husband’s paintings. However, one gratifying incident did happen. In the winter of 1946, before he had had any formal art instruction,  Elden painted an oil of Alberta’s courtyard and entered it in the Annual Exhibition of the Artists of Cincinnati and Vicinity and it was accepted for display and sold to a college professor from Oxford, Ohio. This was the first of hundreds of such successes in his 37-year career, seeming to justify the promise Alberta had seen in the young artist whom she helped and encouraged in the winters of 1945-47.

Alberta Kinsey died in New Orleans in 1952. Her nephew, Donald C. Kinsey, of Detroit, journeyed to New Orleans to bring the remains back to Ohio for burial in Riverside Cemetery in West Milton.

Over the years Alberta returned regularly to West Milton to visit family and friends, who acquired many of her paintings. On Saturday, April 28, due to the generosity of these  collectors, 12 of her paintings will be available for an exhibition of work by West Milton Artists that has been arranged by the Committee celebrating West Milton’s Bicentennial. The exhibition will be shown from 10 A.M. to 7 P.M. at the Hoffman United Methodist Church, 201 S. Main Street, and open to the public with no charge. It will include work of West Milton artists, from Marcus Mote,  famous Quaker artist born in 1817, to present day artists and students.