Lucy Brown L’Engle

    Lucy Brown L’Engle’s grave in Snow Cemetery, Truro MA.   “My pictures represent my feelings about experiences. They are experiments in modern art.” — Lucy L’Engle   Lucy Brown L’Engle (1889-1978) is another of my ghostly neighbors in Snow Cemetery, Truro MA. In life she lived near me, too — at least in the summers — on Longnook Road with her husband, William (also a painter). They lived in the historic Shebnah Rich house. Other months, they lived in Greenwich Village. Her friends called her ‘Brownie.’ Edmund Wilson, in a mocking entry in his diary about her daughter Camille’s wedding to Jack Hall, referred to Lucy as ‘the Duchess of All the Truros.’ (The Shores of Bohemia, page 101.) The L’Engles were ‘upper crust Bohemians,’ both coming from affluent families.        Lucy and William L’Engle in 1939.   Lucy studied at the Art Students League in New York and the Academie Julian in Paris, where she met her husband in 1914. Prior to Paris, in 1909, she visited Provincetown for the first time to study with Charles Hawthorne. The L’Engles were part of the generation of American artists who were exiled from Europe during the First World War. They settled in Provincetown due to the cheap accommodations — with Lucy setting up a Provincetown studio in 1918. In 1924 the family moved their summer home from Provincetown to Truro.    The L’Engles were associated with the modernist faction of the Provincetown Art Association, with Lucy serving on the first Modernist jury in 1921. In 1925, Lucy became a founding member of the New York Society of Women Artists.       Lucy L’Engle, Electrifying Truro, 1939.   Given her training at Academie Julian in Paris (with with Albert Gleizes), her early work was influenced by Cubism. But her work ultimately was eclectic — with periods of representational painting and pure abstraction. In 1930 she was quoted as saying her work was concerned with developing a “a more modern American style,” as opposed to European conventions of the time. In 1969, late in her career, she became interested in Archaic Greek Sculpture, and published a catalog of her drawings of those sculptures.    She died in Provincetown on March 14, 1978.       Lucy L’Engle, Truro in Winter, 20 x 26 inches, oil on board       Lucy L’Engle, Portrait of Helen Sawyer, 35 x 30 inches, oil on canvas, 1917.       Lucy L’Engle, Swimming With Dolphins, 1960s, watercolor, 19 x 23 inches.       Lucy L’Engle, Painting the Hull (reverse Still Life by William L’Engle), Early 20th c. Oil on panel, 30 x 24 inches.       Lucy L’Engle, The Artist’s Property At Long Nook Road, Truro oil on canvas estate stamped lower left, 30 x 24 inches