Lauren Ford. 1891-1973.
The Baptism of Count Arnauld. 1931. Oil on canvas. 15 x 19 (framed 25 x 29). Ferargil Galleries label, verso. Illustrated: Life Magazine, December 25, 1944, and Lauren Ford, The Legion of Mary, 1945. Exhibited: The Rye, N.Y., Historical Society, June 27-September 11, 2004. Price upon request.
While Lauren Ford was living in France, she painted as a memento the story of the baptismal rites of the child of the friends with whom she was staying. In the tradition of medieval religius paintings, guardian angels and the dove representing the Holy Spirit hover over the pabtismal scene. The pabtism took place in the country church of St. Pallais de Nègrignac.
Lauren Ford was the daughter of Simeon Ford and Julia Ellsworth Ford, nee Shaw. Simeon was proprietor, with his brother-in-law Samuel Shaw, of the fashionable Grand Union Hotel in New York City and a published after-dinner speaker. Julia was an author of children’s books and doyenne of a salon that included the Lebanese mystic Kahlil Gibran, celebrated Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats, and influential American dancer Isadora Duncan. While young Lauren’s interests relegated her to the shadows of Julia’s social set, the artistically charged environment of Julia’s salon and Julia’s guidance and encouragement nourished Lauren’s artistic talents.
Lauren was sent to France at the age of nine to study painting with her uncle, Lawrence Shaw, her namesake.His tutelage, the medieval art of France, and the magic of the liturgy and Gregorian chant of the monks of Solesmes, began to shape young Lauren’s artistic and spiritual development. She would eventually become a Catholic, taking simple vows as a Benedictine Oblate, and an aesthetic and spiritual force for good through her art and philanthropy.
In New York, she studied at the Art Students League with G. Bridgman; DuMond. She continued to travel throughout France and to study its medieval traditions along with study in Paris, where she was exposed to the academic tradition of the nineteenth century as well as to the avant-garde. Her early art, which explored the world of children, grew to focus on the world of the Christ Child and the Holy Family.
Its mise-en-scene was a farm amidst the rolling hills around Bethlehem, Connecticut, that Lauren Ford called Sheepfold, a biblical reference to the special regard God has for his children, which was her home and studio for the last thirty years of her life. And its models were her neighbors, mostly the farmers, who worked the fields around Sheepfold. In the 1940s, during the tumultuous years of World War II, those paintings were featured in Life Magazine, and her Christmas scenes were popularized in Christmas cards produced by the American Artists Group.
Exhibitions: WMAA, 1925-26; Ferargil Galleries, NYC (solos, 1930, 1932, 1938); PAFA, 1932-33, 1939-45; CI, 1939 (solo); Corcoran Gal biennials, 1928-45; Corcoran Gal., 1939 (solo); AIC, 1928, 1932, 1937-38.
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