[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]

FAIG, Frances Wiley [1885–1955]

Ohio Landscape

ca1915

oil on canvas / 6 inches by 8 inches

“A noted woman artist from Cincinnati, Ohio, Mrs. Faig studied with Frank Duveneck and also with Charles Hawthorne.  She was a member of the McDowell Society, The Cincinnati Women’s Art Club and the Southern States Art League.  She was married to John T. Faig, professor of mechanical engineering and president from 1918-1951 of the Ohio Mechanics Institute, now the College of Applied Science.

“In addition to the Engineering Library murals at the University of Cincinnati, Mrs. Faig painted murals of the Miami and Erie canals in Hartwell High School and of the Cincinnati hills in the Woman’s City Club.  In 1932 she painted murals in Western Hills High School.”

Les fauves (‘the wild beasts’) was coined by art critic Louis Vauxcelles when he saw the work of Henri Matisse and André Derain in a Paris exhibition of 1905. But unlike the French Impressionist movement, the Fauvists “emphasized painterly qualities and strong color over representational or realist values” retained by the Impressionists.

This small but powerful work comes to the collection from the family of Agincourt businessman Holborn Messenger, a 1914 graduate of the University of Cincinnati, where he may have known the Faigs.