Grace Hill Turnbull, 1880 – 1976

Grace Hill Turnbull, a painter, sculptor, author, poet, and advocate for human rights and temperance, was born on December 30, 1880, in Baltimore, Maryland, into a "literary and prosperous Victorian family" (The Sun, Sept. 21, 1980, D6). Her father, Lawrence Turnbull, was a lawyer and realtor who had once served as the editor of Southern Magazine. Her mother, Francese Hubbard Litchfield Turnbull, the first president of the Women's Literary Club (established in 1890), was an author of "several historical romances" (The Art Digest, October 15, 1931, 6) and a prominent patron of the arts.

The Turnbull home in Baltimore was “a center for poets like Sidney Lanier and notable figures such as Johns Hopkins and Dr. Gildersleeve, among others” (Muller 7). Grace’s brother, Edwin Litchfield Turnbull, was a musician who played a pivotal role in founding the Johns Hopkins University Orchestra and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. He composed or arranged numerous musical scores, including 1901’s Farewell to Nancy with lyrics by Robert Burns, featuring an “attractive cover” designed by his artist sister (The Sun, October 27, 1901, 8).

Grace Turnbull's artistic work was extensive and diverse, encompassing portraits (including miniatures on ivory), both traditional and abstract landscapes, as well as sculptures of various sizes in bronze, clay, wood, marble, and stone. Her sculptures included female water fountains, animal figures, and religious characters. Known for her bold freedom of expression, she often remarked in interviews that she was liberated from the need to earn a living from her art. A unique, outspoken, and deeply religious individual, she used her wealth and influence to promote the arts and to support social causes for young people and the disadvantaged.

Grace Turnbull’s creative talents emerged early, supported by her family, who encouraged her to attend art classes as a child. Initially working with pastels, she later explained, “[I] did not want to take the time to stop to wash my brushes and hands, as I would have to do if I used oils or watercolors, and so my teacher, to humor me, gave me pastels to work with. I have kept up the practice of using them to some extent until now” (L.C.A. 6). Although she modestly claimed she "just learned around," Turnbull trained under several influential artists.

During family summers in New England, she studied landscape painting with Willard Metcalf. She attended the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she also worked as an assistant to Philadelphia portrait and genre painter Thomas P. Anshutz, crediting these three years as her most formative in painting. Turnbull then expanded her training: she spent five months with Joseph De Camp at the Art Students League in New York, five months with Ephraim Keyser in Baltimore, and another five months with Sir Moses Ezekiel in Rome in 1902. She also studied for three months at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under William Merritt Chase and took additional lessons with Cecilia Beaux. She noted, however, “I am not sure that Cecilia Beaux helped me much. Her class was very crowded, and she had only about half a minute to give to each of her pupils” (L.C.A. 6).

Despite her conservative background, Turnbull sought a comprehensive art education, even deciding to take a life class to study from a nude model—a bold choice for a woman of her time.

Mother's objection I felt I could overcome […] but she told me solemnly that if I carried out my intention of working in a life class it would kill Father […] I decided that I must take my life into my own hands then or never. As a matter of fact, my joining the life class appeared to have no malignant effect whatever upon my father (cited in Dorsey n.p.).

Grace Turnbull's early exhibitions demonstrated her versatility across media. In March 1907, she debuted with portraits and miniatures at the Arundell Club (The Sun, March 19, 1907, 7). That same year, she exhibited miniatures on ivory at the Maryland pavilion of the 1907 Jamestown Exposition (The Sun, January 7, 1966, B5). By 1908, Turnbull was recognized as one of Maryland's talented artists, participating in a Baltimore exhibit of plastic arts organized by the National Sculpture Society (The Sun, April 12, 1908, 16).

In 1909, she exhibited at the New York Water Color Club alongside future Girls' Art Club affiliates Lee Lufkin Kaula and Mary Van der Veer. Her “large pastel portrait,” noted for its “low tones” and the serious approach she brought to pastels, received praise (Cary 36-37). She also exhibited with the Washington Water Color Club in February 1909, where her pastel of a child was described as “of such distinguished merit that it cannot be passed without note. It is strongly modeled, excellent in tone, and insistent with personality” (American Art News, February 27, 1909, 2). Additionally, the Charcoal Club exhibited several of her miniatures in February 1910 (American Art News, February 19, 1910, 2).

In 1912, The Sun published an extensive interview with Grace Turnbull as she was beginning to establish herself professionally. The article highlighted her talent for portraiture and her efforts to make sitters feel at ease in her studio. Yet, it also revealed her modest and self-effacing character: “You see, there is not a thing to say about me,” she declares in farewell. “I have had a scrappy sort of an art education, with no adventures of any sort to make it interesting” (L.C.A. 6).

Despite her modesty, Turnbull did indeed seek adventure. Though she insisted that “it is not necessary now to expatriate oneself to study art. We have excellent schools in this country. None in the world is better than the Philadelphia Academy” (L.C.A. 6), she ventured to France, Germany, and Italy the year before World War I. During this period, from approximately October 1913 to at least March 1914, she lived and worked at the Girls' Art Club, where she maintained a studio.

Like many American women artists in Paris, Turnbull visited Gertrude Stein after an introduction from Ephraim Keyser, the Baltimore sculptor with whom she had once studied. However, she found her experience at Stein’s salon to be unpleasant:

Ephraim Keyser... had given me a letter of introduction to his niece Gertrude Stein who was then living there, and fortified by the possession of this document the two girls and I undertook to storm the lioness in her den, choosing for the purpose one of her evenings at home. We were at once translated into an atmosphere terrifyingly transcendental. Gertrude, a monumental figure in a dark monkish garment free-flowing from the neck, after rising to meet us, returned to her sofa and her large black cigar; glancing over the note of introduction, the oracle uttered these remarkable words: "Well, look around, won't you." We did. That was all we could do, for the strange, exotic, short-haired women and long-haired men milling about in a mute mystic haze had not a motion to rescue the three young Americans from their predicament, equally strange as we were to them by virtue of mere normality. On the walls were a number of early Picassos, circus folk of the blue period, and other paintings, post-impressionistic, cubistic, etc., new to us then as to the world; but they couldn't hold us indefinitely; and when Margaret, the bravest of our crew, attempted to address one of the transcendental beings and met with no response from her, our only resource seemed to be to withdraw from the assembly presences so little desired (Chips From My Chisel 34).

A decidedly traditional artist, Turnbull did not embrace modernism. Even in her seventies, she expressed strong objections to artists like Matisse, particularly criticizing his Blue Nude for its treatment of the human figure: “[...] the human face and form have been subjected to such indignities with no compensatory gain in pure design or color” (cited in Dorsey, n.p.).

While in Paris, Turnbull exhibited at the Salon des Beaux-Arts in 1914, the American Woman’s Art Association at 4 rue de Chevreuse, and the International Art Union, where she received the Whitelaw Reid Prize in 1914 for her oil painting Mother and Child, also known as Twilight or Crépuscule at the Salon des Beaux-Arts (J.M.M. 646). In her 1953 autobiography, Chips From My Chisel, Turnbull included a letter dated February 21, 1914, in which she wrote:

Why they should have taken it into their heads to single out my insignificant, subdued, old-fashioned Mother and Child in its dull frame to hang in the central position in the Club Gallery seems strange enough:  but why to this insult they should add the further injury of awarding to it the first prize of 1000 francs ($200), remains an unsearchable mystery (39).

After a brief trip to Brittany, Turnbull sailed back to the United States on September 23, 1914, with plans to eventually return to France to support the war effort, despite her strong commitment to religious pacifism.

After several failed attempts, Turnbull finally arrived in France as a Red Cross volunteer in August 1918. She served as a "Searcher," responsible for writing to the relatives of soldiers who had died and working to identify missing men (Anson TM15):

"I used to get flowers from French home gardens to place on the orange gravel graves of the boys and, slipping one of the few flowers I would send that back in the letter to the mother, as there was so little to tell that would comfort" (cited in Muller 7).

When her war work concluded, Turnbull boarded a military ship in Brest on April 16, 1919, arriving back in the United States on April 25. She promptly resumed her artistic pursuits.

A review in The Sun of Turnbull's 1919 exhibition at Baltimore's Peabody Gallery commended the variety in her works, highlighting the depth of her experiences and the intimate connections she captured with her subjects:

She is an artist who has lived sympathetically among those whose portraits she paints—in Italy where every street corner furnishes a picturesque Latin model; in Spain among the people; in Brittany among peasant children who attend convent schools and kneel before sea coast Calvaries. She knows Paris models and Holland peasants; she has talked with and painted sailors from the Azores, and to slip into the Peabody Gallery for a quiet hour with Miss Turnbull’s paintings and spirited modeled studies, is to feel that her genius has introduced you to many interesting and picturesque people who have passed in and out of her own life (E.E.L. SM3).

Turnbull continued her extensive travels, visiting Bermuda (1920), the West Indies (November 1921 - February 1922), the Grand Canyon (1923), Woodstock (1925), Mexico (1929), and later, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Greece, and Italy (1936). Her exhibition pieces reflected this international experience; she displayed several decorative paintings of Bermuda and the West Indies at the Peabody Gallery in 1920 and 1922. Both exhibitions received highly favorable reviews in The Sun. The first praised her vibrant depictions of nature and the meticulous life studies she had created in Paris (E.E.L., November 14, 1920, MA12). The second review noted a modern quality in her work.

The word impressions conveys very accurately the mission of the pictures to the eye of the beholder. They are painted with strength and boldness after the modern decorative style that is, in truth, a return to the ancient art of Japan that strives for effective and realistic impressions rather than exact imitations of nature (E.E.L. November 19, 1922, P2SN18).

In 1925, Turnbull exhibited a range of paintings at Arundell Hall in Baltimore, from traditional flower studies to abstract works. The Sun critic praised her remarkable energy and intensity, noting that she packed “more dynamite into a square inch of pigment than many artists can conjure out of half a dozen barrels of it” (H.K.F. 11).

Turnbull never married. After her mother’s death in 1927, she collaborated with her architect brother, Bayard—just sixteen months her senior—to design an elaborate and eccentric home in Baltimore. The siblings were close and had experimented with building projects since childhood; at thirteen, Grace and Bayard constructed a miniature marble church in their backyard, complete with a six-foot tower (Anson TM15). As she worked on her new home and studio, sculpting became second nature to Turnbull, and she adorned the property with 12-foot totems intricately carved with religious imagery:

"..we set about planning the house, my brother Bayard and I; for it was to be a homemade house, even to the architect, a house Spanish in feeling, with a hint of Bermuda about it too. The living room, two stories high, with a balcony running around the interior, was suggested by the Cervantes Inn in Toledo. As fancywork during the last months I had carved a nine-foot refectory table [...] and while the house was building I cut designs on certain beam-ends and an inscription on the lintel of the front door [...] (163-164). The corners of the house presented tempting locations for tree-trunk carvings fitted to them [...] I carved a St. Francis Preaching to the Birds [...]" (165). St. Francis was followed on other corners of my house by Christ Touching a Dead Soul to Life, a Madonna and Child and a Flight into Egypt [...] Other emplacements in the garden invited stone sculptures of a Squirrel, a Sleeping Swan [...] (Chips From My Chisel 167).

The house was completed in 1928, and Turnbull remained in this "temple of creativity" for the rest of her life, dedicating herself primarily to sculpture and writing as her main forms of artistic expression:

Upon settling in my new house I ceased altogether to paint and took instead to sculpture which I believe is my more native bent. I have never had any instruction in the cutting of wood or stone [...] I think by actually doing one can learn a great deal. After trying my wings on the first stone carving, I [...] used the 'taille directe' method, cutting directly into the marble or wood with only a sketch a few inches high to guide me (Chips From My Chisel 167).

Turnbull had studied sculpture formally at the Rinehart School of the Maryland Institute and with Moses Ezekiel in Rome in 1902. Despite this training, she is often described as "essentially self-taught" (J.M.M. 646). According to Elizabeth Stevens, “it was not until she was about 50 that she began to concentrate in earnest on the sculptures which were to be the major achievement of her life [...] it was with sculptures of single nude figures—and of single animal figures as well—that Miss Turnbull was to achieve her best works” (The Baltimore Sun, September 21, 1980, D6).

After her friend Lizette Woodworth Reese passed away in 1935, Turnbull was commissioned to create a monument in honor of this poet and teacher. The inspiration for the design came to her following a Mediterranean trip in 1936 – 1937. It was influenced by a recurring motif in Reese's poetry: a shepherd and his flock.

She described the complex creative process in her autobiography, Chips From My Chisel:

I ordered from Georgia the necessary blocks of its native pink marble, and from the half-scale plaster model I made, the stone-cutters began work in Rullman and Wilson's marble-yard; for the figure of the Shepherd was to be over life-size and the whole group much too large to be accommodated in my own studio. So amid the deafening din of electric saws, pneumatic drills and iron hammers, the roar of traveling cranes on the runway overhead, and the screeching of the surface-finishing machine we chiseled away [...] (233-234).

The memorial, titled The Good Shepherd, stands on the former grounds of Reese's alma mater, Eastern High School in Waverly. “On the base beneath the bench is carved the poem ‘Come Every Helplessness’” (Ziegler 141). Turnbull’s connection to Reese traced back to her parents: her father had published one of Reese’s earliest poems in The Southern Magazine when Reese was just seventeen, while her mother, as president of the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore, became friends with Reese and hosted many dinner parties in her honor at the Turnbull family home (Turnbull, 1966, 9-10).

According to the inventory of her papers at Syracuse University, Turnbull’s paintings and sculptures were featured in numerous solo exhibitions, including shows at the Delphic Studio in New York (1931, 1946) and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. (1948). She also participated in group exhibitions at venues such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the International Art Union in Paris. In January 1966, a significant solo exhibition of her work opened at the Baltimore Junior College Art Gallery. The Baltimore Sun noted the event and quoted the exhibition catalog’s foreword by Bernard Perlman, head of the Baltimore Junior College Art Department: “In all her art work, this warm and wonderful woman transmits her love for her subject matter, be it a painted figure composition of a mother and child or a landscape with lush tropical foliage, a sculpted religious or secular figure, or the study of a penguin or python” (B5).

Turnbull received several awards for her work. For example, her plaster torso won the Anna Hyatt Huntington Prize at the National Association for Women Artists in 1931 and earned first prize and a silver medal at the Maryland Institute Alumni Show in 1932. Her fountain figure received first prize in the Women’s Achievement Exhibition in 1932 and an honorable mention from the Palm Beach Art Center in Florida in 1935.

Throughout her adult life, Turnbull adhered to her parents' conservative values. Relatives described her as “as severely disciplined as if she had been under the rule of a convent” (The Baltimore Sun, December 29, 1976, C1). Deeply committed to abstinence, she was a fervent advocate for temperance, reportedly serving nothing stronger than apple juice and abstaining from tobacco, alcohol, coffee, tea, and soda (Dorsey). Her frugality was evident—she mowed her own lawn, drove a 1937 Ford convertible her entire life, and ate only foods she deemed healthful, never indulging for pleasure (The Baltimore Sun, December 29, 1976, C1).

In contrast to her conservative lifestyle, Turnbull held progressive views on social issues. She was a staunch opponent of segregation, supported educational initiatives for Black Americans, and encouraged young artists by providing financial support and welcoming them to her home.

An inveterate writer, Turnbull used pen and ink to express her spirituality and to advocate her strong views on art and life. She shared her thoughts through exhibition reviews and letters to the editor of regional newspapers. In her review of a 1924 show at the Baltimore Museum of Art, for instance, Turnbull argued passionately for the important role of art museums in society:

The museum of art is as necessary to the welfare of the community as the library or the concert hall, and while there is a dangerous tendency in our older art museums to become mausoleums of art, ‘conventicles of tradition,’ there is one at least in the town of Santa Fé that sets before the public, in a series of more or less transient shows, the most vital native art of today, including that of the American Indian (Art and Archaeology 70).

In 1929, Turnbull published Tongues of Fire, an anthology on non-Christian religions. Five years later, she released The Essence of Plotinus, a translation of the philosopher’s work through Oxford University Press, a project she completed after three years of dedicated seclusion. Although already fluent in French, German, and Italian, Turnbull taught herself Greek specifically to read and translate the original texts.

In the 1950s, she continued her literary pursuits, publishing Fruit of the Vine (1950), a book warning about the dangers of alcohol; her autobiography, Chips from My Chisel (1953); a novel, The Uncovered Well (1954); and Art Book (1959), which detailed her theories on painting and sculpture.

Grace Hill Turnbull passed away from a circulatory disease in 1976 at the age of 96. After a lifetime of generosity and philanthropy, she made one final charitable gesture by bequeathing her studio-house and a collection of artworks to the Maryland Historical Society. Her will included the stipulation that “the premises be kept intact as far as possible” and, if feasible, preserved “as a memorial to my family and me” (Guntz).

In 1980, the Maryland Historical Society presented the exhibition "Selections from the Bequest of Grace Hill Turnbull" in its main galleries, celebrating the 100th anniversary of her birth and recognizing “her efforts to promote the careers of Baltimore artists” (The Baltimore Sun, May 25, 1980, T13). In a critical review, Elizabeth Stevens dismissed Turnbull’s work as derivative, conservative, and overly sentimental, arguing that her fragmented outlook prevented her from evolving beyond a talented amateur to a mature artist with a cohesive vision (The Baltimore Sun, September 21, 1980, D6).

However, we respectfully disagree, choosing instead to honor Turnbull’s own humble reflection about her work: “I am no Michelangelo [...] I have done the best with what I had” (Anson TM15).

Epilogue: In the summer of 2008, the Maryland Historical Society transferred all rights and responsibilities for the Turnbull property. PNC Bank subsequently auctioned the house’s contents and sold the property to Douglas Hamilton Jr., CEO of a local manufacturing company and a trustee of the Walters Art Museum. After investing "six figures" into renovations and reconfigurations with architect James R. Grieves, the Hamiltons made it their home in 2011.

Sources

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