Henrietta Shore

Henrietta Mary Shore was born in Toronto, Canada in 1880. As a young artist, she attended The Art Students League and was taught American realist painting as a pupil of the great Robert Henri and William Merritt Chase. Shore also travelled to London to attend Heatherly Art School and became a student of John Singer Sargent, a master of figurative painting. Shore was fortunate to learn the foundations of painting technique from the most notable artists of the 20th Century.

Shore helped to found the New York Society of Women Artists. Often likened to Georgia O'Keeffe of the same period, Shore began to explore modernism. Using strong colors, bold lines, and cubist foreshortening Henrietta Shore, pushed the boundaries of realism. She often painted botanical studies imbued with a surrealist tendancy.

In 1913, Shore moved to Los Angeles and helped found the Los Angeles Society of Modern Artists. Many California modern painters of the period like Mabel Alvarez, Elanor Colburn, and Helen Lundeberg, were exploring technique, color, and composition-- but continued to paint realist subjects. Shore won a silver medal at the 1915 Pan-American Exposition in San Diego. She and a fellow painter of the period, Helena Dunlap partook in a two-person exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum (LACMA).

Shore became an established artist and the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts help a retrospective of her paintings. In 1924, she was chosen to be one of 25 American women represented in a Paris exhibition. She also traveled to Mexico where she painted portraits of the famous artists, poets, and avant-gardesof the time including Jose Orozco, Jean Charlot.

In California, Henrietta Shore met photographer Edward Weston who created a series of photographs based on Shore’s paintings. Shore eventually settled in Carmel, California and continued to paint. During the Great Depression, Shore worked for the Treasury Relief Art Project and completed murals at the Monterey post office and another at the Santa Cruz post office.