Louise Josephine Pope

Louise Josephine Pope was an American painter. She studied at the New York School of Art, and then went abroad to study in Paris, Amsterdam and Madrid with Robert Henri. She exhibited work in the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1912. In the United States, she exhibited at the National Academy of Design, the 1910 Exhibition of Independent Artists, the 1913 New York Armory Show, and the 1915 Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture by Women Artists for the Benefit of the Woman Suffrage Campaign, among others, contributing to the introduction of European Modernism to the United States.

Education

Louise Josephine Pope, of New York City, attended Wellesley College from 1890 to 1894, graduating with her B.A. She went on to study at the New York School of Art, where Robert Henri was teaching. On June 15, 1907, Louise Pope and Kathleen McEnery led the list of awards for the school with Portrait class scholarships; Louise Pope received a Composition scholarship as well.

Career

Pope reportedly moved to Paris with her mother, Josephine B. Pope, to study art, but exactly when is unclear. In the 1913 catalog, she is listed at 50 Washington Square, New York.

She attended Robert Henri's summer school in Madrid, Spain in 1906, as well as his summer school in Haarlem and Amsterdam in 1907. She was mentioned frequently in letters by Robert Henri and John Sloan, and apparently was considered a possible second wife for Robert Henri, whose first wife had died in 1905, and who remarried in 1908. She was included in the 1910 Exhibition of Independent Artists. In the October show she included four nude studies. her work was heavily criticized. A review of a group show at the MacDowell Club in 1913 sniped: 'Louise Pope, who went to Paris, where she now is, a few years ago, a sane and healthy painter, has felt the lure of the "Futurists," and has not yet recovered. She shows four nude studies, presumably females.' At the Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture by Women Artists for the Benefit of the Woman Suffrage Campaign in 1915, her work was identified as "Cubist" and described as "incoherent and quite barbarous" and as depicting "prophecies of subway explosions."

Marriage Louise J. Pope was married to Henri Hourtal (1877–1944) of Paris, on December 30, 1916, in the Church of Saint-Sulpice, Paris. Hourtal, also a painter, was attached to the French army in Morocco and was later recognized for his paintings of Algeria.

Louise J. Pope has been incorrectly identified as the wife of Dr. Robert Ticehurst, but Dr. Ticehurst's obituary clearly identifies his wife as "Alice Louise Pope, R.N. (1914–2004)", born after the 1913 Armory Show. It is also easy to confuse Louise Josephine Pope with another Louise Pope who graduated from Wellesley College in 1892, later marrying Homer Johnson to become Louise Pope Johnson.