Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones: The Artist Who Lived Twice

Christened by New York art critics as its "find of the year" in 1908, Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones (1885-1968), still in her teens, sold her American impressionism-style paintings for a small fortune and won international honors. And then, she disappeared.

Thirty years after her breakdown, A......more

Christened by New York art critics as its "find of the year" in 1908, Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones (1885-1968), still in her teens, sold her American impressionism-style paintings for a small fortune and won international honors. And then, she disappeared.

Thirty years after her breakdown, American Artist magazine would call her "a phenomenon in the world of paint," painter Marsden Hartley would write she was "a thinking painter with a rare sense of the drama of poetic and romantic incident," and her works would belong to some of the country's most prestigious museums and collections. She saw God when she painted, she believed, and what more could one ask?(less)

After inadvertently rescuing the artist’s scrapbooks from an incinerator, Barbara Lehman Smith first wrote about Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones for Pennsylvania Heritage magazine in 1995. As a feature writer who specializes in health, history, and the arts, she continued on to other projects but kept comi......more

After inadvertently rescuing the artist’s scrapbooks from an incinerator, Barbara Lehman Smith first wrote about Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones for Pennsylvania Heritage magazine in 1995. As a feature writer who specializes in health, history, and the arts, she continued on to other projects but kept coming back to the Sparhawk-Jones story. “It seemed every few weeks I learned new information from range of sources—one day an email from a relative in Russia, another day from an art curator in Michigan—and began following one thread to the next. Those who care about Sparhawk-Jones’s work and life and influences are deeply passionate, and that motivated me to weave those threads back together as best I could with this biography,” says Ms. Smith of E

After inadvertently rescuing the artist’s scrapbooks from an incinerator, Barbara Lehman Smith first wrote about Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones for Pennsylvania Heritage magazine in 1995. As a feature writer who specializes in health, history, and the arts, she continued on to other projects but kept coming back to the Sparhawk-Jones story. “It seemed every few weeks I learned new information from range of sources—one day an email from a relative in Russia, another day from an art curator in Michigan—and began following one thread to the next. Those who care about Sparhawk-Jones’s work and life and influences are deeply passionate, and that motivated me to weave those threads back together as best I could with this biography,” says Ms. Smith of Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones: The Artist Who Lived Twice.

Currently a contributing writer for AVALON, a new lifestyle women’s magazine based in Massachusetts, Barbara Lehman Smith has written professionally for more than twenty years including work for the national sports magazine, Triathlete, Physician’s Practice Digest, Maryland Family, Towson Times, Baltimore’s Child, and Martha’s Vineyard magazine, and many other newspapers and publications. With additional experience in public relations and marketing, she also manages Smith Publications, LLC. For eight years, she taught a writing and graphic design class geared for publications at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland, in the Graduate and Professional Studies program. A member of American Independent Writers, Inc., based in Washington, D.C., and the Biographers International Organization, she also belongs to the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society.

Ms. Smith earned her M.A. from the University of Baltimore and her B.A. degree from the University of Maryland. A native of Canton, Massachusetts, she lives in Baltimore, Maryland with her husband, Chris, and their three children. (less)