Lucille Douglass

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Lucille Sinclair Douglass (November 4, 1878 – September 26, 1935) was an American painter, etcher, and lecturer who traveled widely in Asia and wrote about what she saw. She was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, to Walton Eugene Douglass and Mary Sinclair Douglass, in a family described as living in “genteel poverty” after the Civil War. She began art lessons with her mother, who taught at what would become Huntingdon College, and earned her AB there in 1895.

In 1899 she moved to Birmingham to work as an artist and teacher, sometimes painting china to support herself. From 1901 to 1908 she had a studio in the Watts Building and helped found the Birmingham Art Club in 1908. She studied at the Art Students League in summers and traveled to Europe for further training from 1909 to 1912, studying in Paris with teachers such as Lucien Simon and René Menard and later becoming the assistant to Alexander Robinson, traveling with his classes to the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, and North Africa. By 1913 she had returned to the United States and spent a summer in Oakland with artist Isabelle Percy West.

In 1920 Douglass went to China to work for the Methodist Episcopal Church. In Shanghai she organized a workshop where Chinese women colorized photographic slides and learned English. She also wrote for the Shanghai Times and became friends with writers Florence Wheelock Ayscough and Helen Churchill Candee, who would publish and illustrate her work. Douglass traveled with Candee through the Far East in 1926–27, visiting Indochina, Siam, Java, and Bali. The journeys inspired Candee’s book New Journeys In Old Asia (1927) and Douglass’s own Pastels, Etchings, of Cambodia and China (1928). Angkor Wat left a deep impression on her.

She lived mainly in New York, teaching art history and drawing on the SS President Wilson’s world voyage in 1928–29. In 1928 the New York Evening Post called her one of America’s best known painters and etchers. Douglass died in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1935. Her ashes were spread around Angkor, a place that had inspired her early in her travels. Her works are housed in major museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Birmingham Museum of Art, and the British Museum, among others.