STEELL, Susan
Description:
Bust-length, facing left.
Location:
Present whereabouts unknown
Exhibition:
DUVEEN GALLERIES, 720, Fifth Avenue, New York, April 6 – 18, 1925, No. 19.
Bibliography:
The Theatre, Vol. 37, Issue 262, April 1923, p. 38 (illustrated).
American Art News, Vol. XXXIII, No. 27, New York, April 11, 1925.
The New York Herald, Sunday, April 22, 1925.
The sitter was born on November 7th 1906 in New York and died in Washington on November 11th, 1959. She was the daughter of Mr. & Mrs. Willis Steell. Mr. Steell (1866-1941), a playwright originally from Detroit, and author of the comedy ‘The Prospector’ and ‘In Seville and Three Toledan Days’, wrote the article “Painting the Pope’s Portrait” which appeared in the New York Herald, November 5, 1922. Susan Steell won the first scholarship for American girls to study at the Paris studio of Mme. Blanche Marchesi that was established in 1923 by the opera singer Mme. Marie Jeritza. Suzanne Steel was one of the actress Katharine Hepburn’s friends at the time of her first Hollywood success. She may have been bisexual. In 1932 her father and she were living at 171 East 81st Street, New York City.
American Art News, April 11, 1925, said that this picture ‘…shows Mr. Ury at his most discerning.’
The duotone photograph in the artist’s papers bears the stamp of Mary Hopson.
