FROM TUSKEGEE TO ANGKOR: THE ODYSSEY OF LUCILLE DOUGLASS

Alabama Heritage, Summer 2006 by Goldfarb, Stephen

IN AN ERA WHEN SOCIETY EXPECTED WOMEN TO BE DAINTY, PASSIVE, AND ENTERTAINING, ALABAMA ARTIST LUCILLE SINCLAIR DOUGLASS DEFIED CONVENTIONS BY TRAVELING THE WORLD AND CAPTURING HER ADVENTURES IN EXOTIC ETCHINGS, PASTELS, AND WATERCOLORS. By STEPHEN GOLDFARB

IN 1926 LUCILLE SINCLAIR DOUGLASS (1878-1935) visited the ancient Gambodian ruins at Angkor for the first time. That December the forty-eight-year-old artist wrote to her friend Leona Caldwell of her first impressions of this far-off and exotic place:

Angkor is one of the really great experiences of my life-a more intellectual than emotional experience-not that it left me cold, quite the contrary-but it was more of an uplift-an inspiration. Our stay-longer than most tourists-was all too short-Angkor Wat alone requires years of study-living with understanding-a few days seems but a mockery. I have never had a place affect me so peculiarly. . . . I shall go back for a time as long as I can stand it and do further study on the spot. You see the ruins are set in the midst of the jungle-which held them in its clutches for so many centuries that it still seems jealous of them.

Douglass described the Angkor climate as "the most trying [that] I have ever encountered ... [with its] great humidity and high temperatures-an oppressive heaviness which brought all the moisture to the surface [of one's skin] and left you exhausted with the slightest effort." And this complaint comes from a woman who grew up in central Alabama.

But Douglass did return the very next year. She spent five months there with the purpose of rendering the temples and other ruins in etchings, which could capture their grandeur and intricacy in a way that photography could not. These etchings were first exhibited in April 1928 in Washington, D.G., under the auspices of the French ambassador, and then at the French Colonial Exhibition in Paris in 1931. The story of just how Douglass made her way from the Black Belt of Alabama to the jungles of Cambodia is one of equal parts natural talent, hard work, and fortuitous circumstances.

LUCILLE DOUGLASS WAS BORN ON NOVEMBER 4, 1878, in Tuskegee, Alabama, the daughter of Walton Eugene Douglass (a Civil War veteran) and Mary Sinclair (Mollie) Douglass. She grew up in a large house but in the genteel poverty that characterized so much of the nineteenth-century, postbellum South. Little is known about Douglass's early years, except that she was a sickly child who spent a great deal of time reading, favoring books about travels to distant and exotic lands. In interviews she gave after gaining a measure of fame, Douglass singled out the all-but-forgotten travel stories of Hezekiah Butterworth-whose seventeen volumes of Zig-Zag Journeys enjoyed considerable popularity among young readers near the end of the nineteenth century-as having stimulated her yearning for adventure.

Douglass received her A.B. (baccalaureate degree) in 1895 at the age of seventeen at Alabama Conference Female College, a forerunner of Huntingdon College, where her mother taught. Unfortunately, records do not survive to describe Douglass's course of study, though it seems safe to assume that she continued to receive art training from her mother, a practice begun when Douglass was a child. In 1899 Douglass moved to Birmingham, where she made a living as both an artist and an art teacher. She occupied a studio in the old Watts Building between 1901 and 1908. The 1907 city directory listed her as a "china painter." Years later Douglass made reference to the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of roses that she painted on teacups and other crockery. The sale of this china, as well as hand-painted place cards, financed her future art training. In 1908 she banded with fellow artists Delia Dryer, Hannah Elliot, Carrie Hill, and four other female artists as founding members of the Birmingham Art Club.

Even before Douglass left for Europe in 1909, she sought art training beyond what was available in Birmingham. For several summers she attended the Art Students League in New York City, though there is no record with whom she studied. Between the years 1909 and 1912, she received art training in Europe. In Paris she studied with Lucien Simon and René Menard. Of greater importance was the time she spent with Alexander Robinson. With his classes she traveled all over Europe-Holland, Spain, and Italy-and North Africa and became his assistant and an art teacher. After her first year with Robinson, she asked him for a frank evaluation of her work; his reply was indeed frank: "You have less talent than many, but you will go farther than the rest because once you undertake a thing you see it through."

A collection of her drawings and pastel sketches held in the Birmingham Museum of Art reflect her traditional art training, which emphasized the anatomically correct rendering of the human figure, and depict the local folkways of the places she visited. With two exhibits of her paintings displayed in Paris in 1911, she was on her way to establishing herself as an artist. By 1913 Douglass had returned from Europe. She spent that summer with artist Isabelle Percy (who married George P. West in 1916), painting in the northern part of Percy's home state of California. World War I ended any further hopes of European travel and training and proved a trying time. City directories show that she kept a residence and studio in Birmingham from 1915 to 1917. Some sources claim that she took training as a nurse and worked with soldiers who were "shell shocked," and that she herself had some kind of mental breakdown, for which she spent time recovering in Texas and California.