Patricia Quealy Moore
Guest Curator
A recent member of the Arts Club, Patricia Quealy Moore received her graduate degree in art history from George Washington University. She has presented numerous papers on art history at academic fora, including most recently in April 2010 at the University of California (San Diego) Sixth Annual Art History Symposium, where she discussed her research on the portraits of Alice Neel and gender identity. Portrait of a Lady: Rediscovering the Art of Mathilde Mueden Leisenring represents almost three years of research by Moore and is her first exhibition as curator. The club's plan is to present a series of exhibitions based on the art of its early founders as the club approaches its centennial year in 2016.
Portrait of a Lady: Rediscovering the Art of Mathilde Mueden Leisenring
September 9, 2011 to September 30, 2011
Monroe Gallery and Parlors
Washington native Mathilde Mueden Leisenring (1870–1949) was an influential force in the blossoming of the city’s artistic community early in the last century. Trained in New York and Paris, Leisenring was a pioneer in organizations such as the Society of Washington Artists, the Washington Water Color Club, and the Arts Club of Washington, of which she was a founder. A prolific and widely exhibited painter, she was among the first female instructors at the Corcoran School of Art.
Curator Patricia Moore, an Arts Club member, has assembled the first-ever retrospective of this artist, gathering landscapes, still lives, travel scenes, and the portraits for which she was most celebrated into an exhibition that offers a rare opportunity to view the “poetic sensitivity” for which Leisenring was noted—and revisit an era in which talented women played a key role in shaping Washington’s artistic life.