Violet Beatrice Wenner [Cover title]

N.P.: N.P., 1954. Very good. 6½” x 5”. Stapled wrappers. Pp. [24]. Very good: wrappers gently split above and below staples but holding; a touch of light creasing and spotting. Inscribed by the author on front cover.

This is an apparently unrecorded exhibition catalog of works by a lesser-known artist, Baroness Violet Beatrice Wenner. It holds fine examples of the artist's work, effusive commentary from national newspapers and a heartfelt inscription to a friend with new year's wishes for 1955.

Violet Beatrice Wenner was born to Swiss parents in Manchester, England in 1884. She studied with prolific children's book creator Sir Walter Crane in England and Austrian portraitist Heinrich von Angeli, and was also a talented and touring harpist. Wenner married Baron Von Sternenfels, adjutant general to the king of Battenberg in 1911, but moved to the United States after their divorce in 1922, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1931. Working from her home in Chicago in oils, pastels, charcoal and pen and ink, the Baroness painted portraits of many crowned heads of Europe and prominent Americans such as Presidents Coolidge, Hoover and Roosevelt, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, Emperor Franz Josef of Austria, scientists and entertainment stars. She was a charter member of the Arts Club of Chicago and a director of the American Outdoor Art League, had a large collection of crystal and porcelain from the Napoleon III era that she sold to a Florida museum, and died in Chicago in 1970.

This book features 14 examples of Wenner's portraits, including those of “Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt” and United States Air Corps pilot Ross Beason, Jr., “killed in action 1944. Painting to hang in the Ross Beason Jr. Memorial Hall, Culver Military Academy.” There are paintings of notable Chicago businessmen and their wives, Illinois Governor Len Small, Colonel George A. Whiting and stage actor Alan Mowbray. The book also ran blurbs from national newspapers lauding her “fine” and “charming” works, exhibitions and her studio, “a veritable social and artistic centre.” The artist herself inscribed this copy “To a dear new Friend – from hers too – with all best wishes for a New Year full of realization of her Dreams” and included her signature, Chicago address and telephone number.

No holdings of this booklet were located in OCLC or online. OCLC shows only an exhibition catalog of portraits by the Baroness from the 1920s at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and an artist file on Wenner at the Cleveland, Ohio Museum of Art.