![This wonderful portrait by Vienna-born American artist Martha Greta Kempton depicts a young Black woman with a focused expression, wearing a blue floral blouse against a muted background.
The unidentified woman's skin tone is rich and dark, rendered with visible brushstrokes that give texture to her face and neck. Her hair is styled in a short, upward-swept style. Her expression is serious and perhaps pensive; her gaze is directed to our right, off-canvas. Her lips are a reddish-pink hue.
She is wearing a blue blouse with a bold floral pattern. The flowers are primarily white daisies with hints of orange and red accents. The paint application here is more expressive than on her face, with a looser style emphasizing the vibrancy of the garment.
The background is a simple, light off-white tone; it's minimally detailed and serves mainly to emphasize the beauty and personality of the woman.
In 1947, Kempton painted the official portraits of President Harry S. Truman and First Lady Bess Truman. The catalogue from her solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC in 1949 stated, “Striving for perfect likeness with a blithe disregard for modernistic effects, she [Kempton] works also to portray character and personality without neglecting the balance, composition and effective use of material which distinguish any other fine painting. Her portraits are strong and positive, never vague. She uses choice of pose as well as brush to reveal her study of a subject’s entire being, but with frank emphasis on the best she finds in personality as well as in facial contours. She believes that a relative should recognize a portrait; that a stranger should be able to read a subject’s character almost as well in a painting as by looking at the person. Her many successes bolster her theories.”
In 1963, she was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in England. Today, Kempton is considered by many to be a "Master Portraitist" and “America’s Court Painter.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:dtli5s7b2qnvvqcgh74ruri5/bafkreiaw2ykxs6jj4gjo3n5zjqp4vx2nxntarxtjmnbsh6erqnvgefmreu)
This wonderful portrait by Vienna-born American artist Martha Greta Kempton depicts a young Black woman with a focused expression, wearing a blue floral blouse against a muted background. The unidentified woman's skin tone is rich and dark, rendered with visible brushstrokes that give texture to her face and neck. Her hair is styled in a short, upward-swept style. Her expression is serious and perhaps pensive; her gaze is directed to our right, off-canvas. Her lips are a reddish-pink hue. She is wearing a blue blouse with a bold floral pattern. The flowers are primarily white daisies with hints of orange and red accents. The paint application here is more expressive than on her face, with a looser style emphasizing the vibrancy of the garment. The background is a simple, light off-white tone; it's minimally detailed and serves mainly to emphasize the beauty and personality of the woman. In 1947, Kempton painted the official portraits of President Harry S. Truman and First Lady Bess Truman. The catalogue from her solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC in 1949 stated, “Striving for perfect likeness with a blithe disregard for modernistic effects, she [Kempton] works also to portray character and personality without neglecting the balance, composition and effective use of material which distinguish any other fine painting. Her portraits are strong and positive, never vague. She uses choice of pose as well as brush to reveal her study of a subject’s entire being, but with frank emphasis on the best she finds in personality as well as in facial contours. She believes that a relative should recognize a portrait; that a stranger should be able to read a subject’s character almost as well in a painting as by looking at the person. Her many successes bolster her theories.” In 1963, she was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in England. Today, Kempton is considered by many to be a "Master Portraitist" and “America’s Court Painter.”
Untitled (Portrait of a Young Woman) by Greta Kempton (Austrian-American) - Oil on canvas / c. 1930 - Tweed Museum of Art (Duluth, Minnesota) #WomenInArt #WomanArtist #art #artwork #WomensArt #WomenArtists #artText #GretaKempton #Kempton #TweedMuseumOfArt #TweedMuseum #BlueskyArt #PortraitofaWoman