Florence May Esté

Florence Esté, an artist renowned in her day for oil paintings, watercolors, pastels, etchings and engravings, was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on May 25, 1859. (Most of her passport and registration forms indicate 1859 as the official birth year, though her application for a passport in 1874 marks her date of birth as 1851 and many modern websites indicate 1860). Esté’s family genealogy is nearly impossible to unravel since names, dates, ages, and affiliations vary from one official document to another. Based on these documents, it seems that her father was David K. Este (1812-1864) married to Eliza Phillips Houston in 1840.

Florence first traveled to France and Switzerland in 1855 together with her mother and four siblings (Ancestry.com). According to her passport application of 1874, she and her mother returned to Paris in 1875 “for pleasure.” It is possible that during this brief trip she met up with her friend Emily Sartain, who was then studying with renowned French painter and engraver Évariste Luminais. Upon returning to the U.S., Esté attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, studying under Thomas Eakins from 1876 – 1882. She also studied with William Sartain (1882?), whose studio was intended as an alternative to Eakin’s classes – offering dissection and life classes, as well as drawing and painting from male and female nudes. Other students of Sartain at the time were Cecilia Beaux, Dora Brown, and Julia Foote. In 1885, Esté shared a studio with Blanche Dillaye in Philadelphia. That same year, Esté and her mother spent time in Gloucester, Massachusetts where, she may have studied with Stephen Parrish (Schneider 163).  In the summer of 1886, they stayed around Lake Placid, where her studio was apparently spared from being destroyed in a large nearby fire.

Even in these early years, Florence Esté already began winning recognition for the works she exhibited.

Esté returned to France with her mother in 1887, when she was reported as studying at the Académie Colarossi in 1889 (The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 21, 1889, p. 8) though the length of her stay is unclear. We know she exhibited in the Paris Salons in 1894 (oil painting), 1895 (watercolor), and 1896 (two drawings). She also exhibited at the American Girls’ Art Club in December of 1895, though this may not mean she was living in Paris. Indeed, in her 1915 and 1920 registration forms for the U.S. Consular services, she indicated that she had lived in Paris from 1898 to 1920, with “various visits” to the U.S. On both registration forms, she listed her address as 28 avenue de l’Observatoire in the 14th arrondissement of Paris – a stone’s throw from the Luxembourg gardens, the Girls' Art Club, the Holy Trinity Lodge, and numerous art studios and academies:

I go out on my balcony (I am on the fourth floor) and see the long rows of blazing lights down the Boulevard [...], the grave, the old buildings of the Maternité, the many windows gleaming [...] and calm, overhead, a splendid moon" (Oakley 583).

Esté remained in France for the rest of her life, with her mother as a constant companion until her death in 1909. 

Paris notwithstanding, Brittany was Esté’s favorite haunt. Beginning in 1899, she and her mother spent summers in St. Briac, a coastal town between St. Malo and Dinard, replete with footpaths skirting Brittany’s spectacular Emerald Coast. From here, she could admire and draw the small islands, rocks, and coves, and the resplendent diversity of colors that reached their peak at dusk. In this context, her studio was the great outdoors, which she captured in paintings that were often as grand (some measuring 3x2.5 yards) as her love for Brittany’s “big horizons, its radiant colors, its villages, and St. Malo, rising like Venus, from the blue sea” (cited in Oakley 583).  Her browns, golds, and roses reflected the colors she witnessed. Florence often had to walk for miles along the coast in order to find the vista or scenery that kindled her imagination. In his homage to Esté, Thornton Oakley evoked her lengthy peregrinations: “[...] how vividly I can remember that summer, when I saw her for the last time at St. Briac – her sturdy figure, laden with her canvases and easel, tramping, tramping along the coast among the villages she so adored” (582). 

In Saint-Briac, Esté met and worked with another figure well-known to its inhabitants – artist Alexander Nozal, who, like her, was an ardently independent painter and lover of landscapes. He crisscrossed every corner of St. Briac and other parts of France by foot or bicycle. St. Briac also became a place of sadness for Esté, when her mother died there in September 1909 and left a gaping void in her daughter’s life: “She has been dead for eleven years, and I never see a beautiful thing or read a noble verse without thinking of her radiant presence” (cited in Oakley 584).

For many French art critics, Esté “Japanized” Brittany, since they perceived in her work a resemblance in style and idiom to Japanese prints. However one wished to categorize her art, most viewers were struck by her infinitely affectionate, almost reverential gaze: 

[...] whatever technique she employs, whether she paints in oil, pastel or watercolor, whether she composes an easel painting or a decorative panel, she is much less concerned with fixing the transient modalities of immediate, direct reality, than with highlighting its permanent characteristics, its enduring expressions, its profound and eternal poetry. [...] to move us and awaken in us memories of the impressions and sensations we ourselves have felt in the presence of the same spectacles as those that have moved [her] or to suggest to our eyes, so clearly and so strongly, the reality that, having never yet seen them, we take possession of them through the interpretation [she] imposes on us, as if they were a true and tangible fact! (translated from French, Mourey 34, 36).

Her symbiotic relationship with nature, and with trees in particular, is not only evident in her art but also in her letters. During WWI, in the summer of 1915 the entire town of Saint-Briac had to be evacuated because enemy troops had made inroads in the area. Esté returned to Paris for a time and when she was able to resume her summer retreats, she discovered a rather desolate landscape. In a letter to Thornton Oakley, she described the pain she felt upon seeing that all the trees in the area had been violently cut down:

Your Pine Tree (I had one last year I called Thornton Oakley's) was to have been my first work this summer. It stood on the edge of a forest five miles from here. When I arrived there in June my heart stopped beating. Your tree – and every tree I have painted for years, big, noble splendid creatures, centuries old, had all been hewn down. Not one left. 'Requisitionnés' by the Government and all sent to the Front. It was a most tragic moment. My dear friend's leaving this world [unclear about whom she is speaking] produces the effect that came to me when I saw all my splendid pine trees cut lying dead on the ground. It will not be given to man in Brittany to see their like again. My trees having been hewn down, I have turned to small villages and to rapid and big water color studies of the sea (Oakley 582).

Although Florence Esté permanently relocated to France, staying even through WWI, when the great majority of American artists left the country, she never lost sight of her compatriots or her country of origin, expressing her chagrin at living so far from her homeland:  

I am – passionately – of my own country and long to have a small place there among my fellow workers. Oh dear! to live out of one's own country is not all joy. I have a delightful existence – brimful of pleasant things and notable people. But no notable people can replace the soul of one's countrymen. I, who have been forced to live abroad, have never approved of living out of one's own country. [...] But I miss one thing I have always longed for – my own country and my own countrymen. [...] I have left the “Glorious Top of the Hill” and the path downward, though still delightful, makes me realize what I have missed in living away from my own country and from all of you." (Oakley 584).

It seems that Este could not return to the U.S., possibly for financial reasons, yet her passport applications and her registrations with the U.S. Consular services always refer to her French residency as temporary: In 1918, for example, her application states: “I came abroad in July 1915 for the purpose of studying painting. I am still continuing the study of painting, but at the conclusion of the war, I shall discontinue such study and return to the United States for the purpose of residing and performing the duties of citizenship therein.” (Ancestry.com). Confirmed details of her travels are not extant but it seems she only returned to the U.S. once in 1909 for her mother’s funeral and again for a few months in 1912.

Throughout her French residency, Esté was active in the artistic circles of the American Colony in Paris and invited visiting American artists to her apartment in the 14^th arrondissement or to her home in Brittany. At different periods of time, her close friends were fellow artists Cecilia Beaux, Lucy Scarborough Conant, Elizabeth Nourse, and Emily Sartain in whose Paris studio she worked together with Jeanne Rongier in 1926 (Swinth 57). Of the friendship between Beaux, Conant, and Esté, Geneva Armstrong wrote:

Some years ago a group of young women were students together in Paris. A sincere attachment grew into a lasting friendship, though distance and circumstances kept them mostly apart. But they had the experiences and memories of delightful days together, all of which enriched and sweetened life. The three friends might be treated here as merely three art students, but the rarity of such a tie as theirs seems like an oasis in the impersonal, tumultuous imperatives of the NOW. Lucy Scarborough Conant was one of the group. [...] Her two friends were Cecilia Beaux and Florence Esté. A vital, vivid trio (140).

Esté also worked with other American expatriate painters, such as landscape painter Charles Augustus C. Lasar, whom she admired. Considered the dean of the American artist Colony in Paris, his studio in Montparnasse attracted countless students.

Besides painters, Esté felt that other people (especially American) did not “count” (cited in Oakley 583). In fact, she generally eschewed society. Her letters to Thornton Oakley portray a rather solitary existence; even when she was in Paris or in the company of others, she did not engage much with the trappings of the social scene:

Last winter I gave five 'big' (for my rooms!) receptions. Everybody came. Everybody enjoyed themselves and each other. I, alone, saw no one, enjoyed nothing, and no one even noticed they could not see me because I was always smiling and shaking hands" (Oakley 583-584). 

An air of melancholy surrounded her existence: “[...] I have a heart which is talented beyond measure for (useless) suffering. It is quite restored now – only two or three cracks left” (cited in the American Magazine of Art, 1926, vol. 17, no. 6, p. 307).

All told, art was Esté’s anchor and safe place, as were the quiet contemplation of nature, reading, and correspondence. She was not an especially prolific painter, but gained notoriety in the U.S. and France. Despite the honors and prizes she received throughout her life, she grew weary of the constant struggle to make ends meet through her art:

Well, Painting is a Glorious Misery. It's like rushing up a hill to see the sun rise. One gets to the top with toil and much blown . . . but the sun most generally rises for us in a glum cloud. All the same, we who have embarked in the derisive trade where the laborer so rarely seems to get much hire—we, all the same, are 'les fils du soleil' (Oakley 585).

In spite of her seeming discontent with the hardships of her chosen career, Esté regularly submitted her work to important exhibitions. By 1894, she was exhibiting in the French Salons, either at the Salon de la Société nationale des Beaux-Arts or the Salon des artistes français: 1894, 1895, 1896, 1901 (when she was elected a membre associé of the Salon des artistes français), 1902, 1904, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1909, 1910, 1911 (on the jury of the Salon des artistes), 1912 (named sociétaire of the Salon de la Société nationale des Beaux-Arts), 1913, 1920, 1921, 1922, 1924, 1925, 1926 (several weeks after her death). She also showed at various French galleries, notably Georges Petit, Goupil, Knoedler, and Chaine et Simonson. She was a member of the "Les Quelques," an association of 25 French and American women artists. Her work was lauded by French critics and received much media attention. Writing about the Salon de la Société des Beaux Art in 1900, renowned journalist and art commentator Arsène Alexandre remarked  “[...] as woman and as true artist [...] hers is a name to remember” (cited in The Philadelphia Times, January 15, p. 9). Several of her paintings were bought by private collectors as well as the French government (e.g., “A Far Horizon,” Luxembourg Museum).

Additionally, Esté regularly submitted works to American exhibitions, mainly on the east coast, in Philadelphia (at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts beginning in 1900), but also in New York City (Armory Show of 1913), Buffalo, Boston, and Chicago (Art Institute). The American press kept abreast of her shows in the U.S., England (where all the work she exhibited in 1905 had sold), and France, especially her successes at the French Salons. In 1905, Esté painted a decorative panel that was placed over the stage of the lecture room of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; it was also shown at that year’s Salon de la Société nationale des Beaux-Arts under the title of “Brittany Pine Trees.” She was made an honorary member of the Philadelphia Watercolor Club (c. 1902-1921), which included several of her works in its exhibitions. In 1922, reproductions of her work were shown at an exhibit in the entrance hall of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which honored Philadelphia's four most famous women artists: Mary Cassatt, Cecilia Beaux, Violet Oakley, and Florence Esté (Powell, 10).

In Paris, Esté participated in the numerous exhibitions staged by American art associations. These annual exhibitions attracted not only the who’s who of the American Colony but also the gatekeepers of the French artistic community. They served as powerful introductions to potential buyers and as springboards for other exhibition opportunities. As early as 1895, Esté exhibited in the American Woman’s Art Association show at the Girls’ Art Club. After a roughly six-year hiatus, she became a faithful member of the AWAA, exhibiting her work in seven annual shows: 

• 1901: “Les Ajoncs” and “Les disparus”
• 1903: Painting of a snowy landscape and one of a mountain
• 1905: Painting of a blossoming peach tree and one other; she was also a member of the jury, along with Elizabeth Nourse
• 1906: Three color drawings of Brittany; again, Esté was a member of the jury 
• 1907: Esté was that year’s President of the AWAA but did not show any works due to illness
• 1912: Loan exhibition of several famed American artists, in which only three women were represented: Florence Esté, Elizabeth Nourse, and Janet Scudder 
• 1914: the AWAA’s final exhibition

In 1906, a competing art association, the Art League for Women, was formed at the Church of the Holy Trinity’s Lodge. Located in the Latin Quarter in a Carmelite convent on rue du Val de Grace, close to Esté’s apartment and the Girls’ Art Club, the Lodge hosted the Art League’s regular exhibitions. Its first president was Elizabeth Nourse, with Florence Esté presiding from 1908-1913, when the League was disbanded due to lack of funds. Over the course of its existence, the League served as a great resource for women artists and staged 2-week annual exhibitions that attracted as many as 500 visitors, often opened under the auspices of the American Embassy. It functioned much like the American Woman’s Art Association and provided an additional space for women artists to be recognized for their achievements.

Esté also became a member of the International Art Union, created in 1909 by socialite and philanthropist Grace Whitney Hoff, who had founded the Student Hostel in 1906 for Anglo-American women – a kind of rival organization to the Girls’ Art Club. As honorary President of the Union, Mrs. Whitney Hoff staged several art exhibitions and established the Whitney Hoff Museum Purchase Fund to be used in purchasing the best artwork from each exhibition and donating it to an American museum. The Union was fairly short-lived, only lasting from 1909 to 1914. With respect to Esté, two of its exhibitions are worth noting:

• 1913 – Mary Cassatt was the honorary president. The exhibit was held in the spring at a gallery on Faubourg St. Honoré and caused quite a stir because the jury had awarded the 1,000 franc prize to a portrait by Anne Goldthwaite. Hoff decided that the portrait was too small to be worth the prize, and instead awarded it to Florence Esté, for her landscape of trees in Brittany. According to the New York Times, Esté refused the prize (July 20, 1913, p. 22).

• 1914 – Esté served on the hanging committee and showed in the exhibition at the Hessele Gallery, the last of the Union’s shows.

Florence Esté died suddenly in her apartment at 28 avenue de l’Observatoire on Sunday, April 25, 1926. She had just returned from a service at the American Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity. A note found in her apartment stipulated that she wished to be buried in St. Briac. The Philadelphia Water Color Club devoted a memorial room to her work in its 1926 annual exhibition. The year following Esté’s death, several of her friends and admirers organized a retrospective of 73 watercolors at the Galerie Charpentier, under the patronage of Myron T. Herrick, U.S. Ambassador to France.

In his homage to his friend, Thornton Oakley wrote:

Her death leaves a void in the world of art impossible to fill. From those who knew her well her death takes likewise an inspiring personality. Yet she had, I know, comparatively few close friends. The lives of these few she enriched by sharing with them her buoyant spirit. Hers was a life of struggle. Fate to her, in many ways, was cruel. It swept away her fortune; it swept away the greater number of her nearest and dearest comrades; it cast her, stranded, upon a foreign shore, there held her prisoner. But her courage never quailed. Dauntlessly she faced the years, and by her ardor, will, her love of nature and of life, she rose to take her place among the master-painters of the world (582).

Note: There are almost no extant photographs of Florence Esté, aside from a grainy, badly reproduced passport photo. In addition to painting, Esté also translated French articles for Eliakim Littell’s The Living Age, a weekly literary magazine (1844-1941). 

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