The National Gallery of Art has acquired its first work by Gretchen Woodman Rogers (1881-1967). This artist was one of the most gifted painters of the Boston School and was very popular in her time.
Five O'Clock features a female figure wearing a blue and white dress. The woman has been identified as Kathryn Finn, who served as a model for several Boston painters. Her face is concealed by a sophisticated hat covered in flowers, fruit, and leaves, a studio prop that appears in other paintings by Rogers' contemporaries. In 1899, "a committee of ladies" supporting independent but equally welfare-minded young women organized a sorority club "for the benefit of girls studying in Boston away from home".
Each afternoon, a member of the committee and a student prepared tea at five o'clock for the members of the club. For young women studying at the Museum of Fine Arts, like Rogers, the late-afternoon social event followed a morning of instruction, lunch at the sponsored School Lunch Club, and private studio work. Gretchen Rogers' Five O'Clock subtly acknowledges the afternoon tea ritual that empowered one generation of women to support the aspirations of the next.
Gretchen Rogers was born in 1881 in Boston. Daughter of a banker, she became a student of Edmund Tarbell at the age of 20 at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Edmund Tarbell, Frank Weston Benson and William McGregor Paxton were the leading artists of the Boston School - They had studied abroad (mainly in France) before returning home. Gretchen Rogers studied with Tarbell for almost eight years and he described her as "the best student I ever had". Rogers exhibited in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., winning numerous awards, including a silver medal at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915 for her self-portrait "Woman in a Fur Hat."
After her mother's death in 1937, Rogers stopped painting. She moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where her sister and uncle were both prominent bacteriologists at Yale University. She died in 1967.
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