May Alcott Nieriker, Author and Advocate: Travel Writing and Transformation in the Late Nineteenth Century

By Julia Dabbs

May Alcott Nieriker, Author and Advocate examines in-depth the writings on art and travel by the youngest sister of famed novelist Louisa May Alcott. Like other American women in the later nineteenth century, due to her gender May was unable to receive the advanced training and exhibition opportunities in the USA that she needed to become a notable professional painter. An additional obstacle was her family’s insecure financial status, making it difficult to study abroad for training. Fortunately, thanks to Louisa’s generosity May was able to make three extended trips to London and Paris in order to gain further training, and eventually attained the honor of having two paintings accepted into the Paris Salon. However, this book argues that Alcott Nieriker’s main contributions to cultural history were not necessarily her artistic creations, but rather her publications on travel and art—specifically, four articles for the Boston Evening Transcript and an 1879 guidebook, Studying Art Abroad and How To Do It Cheaply. In these works May sought to transform the art world, and social mores, through her advocacy for the rights of women to have equal access to a professional, artistic career.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781785278662

Book preview

May Alcott Nieriker, Author and Advocate

May Alcott Nieriker,

Author and Advocate

Travel Writing and Transformation in the Late Nineteenth Century

Julia Dabbs

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2022

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Julia Dabbs 2022

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021953394

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-864-8 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-864-9 (Hbk)

Cover image: Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library

This title is also available as an ebook.

To those women of modest means who still long to study art abroad; and to the memory of my sister, Patricia Dabbs, who like May traveled abroad and was a very talented artist.

Nil Desperandum

(Never despair)

—Amy’s motto, from Little Women

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I. Previous Scholarship on the Travel Writings of May Alcott Nieriker

II. Defining May Alcott Nieriker’s Travel Writing

III. Contents, Contexts, and Methodologies

IV. Notes to the Reader

1. The Transnational Artist

I. Travel Abroad and May Alcott Nieriker’s Artistic Transformation

Setting the Stage in America

The Impact of the Grand Tour

In London with J. M. W. Turner, 1873–74

In Pursuit of Artistic Fame: Concord to Paris, 1874–77

Retreat to London, and Return to Paris, 1877–79

II. Travel Abroad and Physical Transformations

Rosa Peckham’s Portrait of the Parisian May

Couture Performativity

III. Travel Abroad and the Transformation of National Identity

Cultural Comparisons and a Growing Discontent

Final Transformations: Love, Marriage, and the Rejection of America

2. The Travel Writer

I. Prelude

Daring to Go Solo: May Alcott Nieriker and Travel Abroad by Nineteenth-Century American Women

Travel Writing by American Visual Artists and Women in the Nineteenth Century

Precedents: May’s Letters from the Grand Tour

May Alcott Nieriker’s Early Travel Chronicle: A Trip to St. Bernard

II. Alcott Nieriker’s London Travel Writings

The Newsworthy Urban Chronicle: How We Saw the Shah

The Travel Advice Articles

The Carpetbag Travel Manuscript: An Artist’s Holiday

III. Studying Art Abroad

Intentions and Audience

Organization and Content

The Publication of Studying Art Abroad

The Reception of Studying Art Abroad

3. The Art Critic and Commentator

I. Prelude

American Women and Art Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: Some Brief Background

Alcott Nieriker’s Beginnings as an Art Critic and Commentator

II. On Modern Watercolor and J. M. W. Turner

"Great Disappointment": Alcott Nieriker on the Modern School of English Watercolor

Alcott Nieriker’s Painted Advocacy of J. M. W. Turner

Alcott Nieriker’s Written Advocacy of J. M. W. Turner

III. A Broader Perspective

Alcott Nieriker’s Critical Commentary on Other Artists, Especially Women

Alcott Nieriker’s Autocriticism

4. The Social Justice Advocate

I. Alcott Nieriker’s Advocacy for People of Color

Teaching African Americans

Advocacy Abroad: Blackness and Slavery in the Studios of Paris

II. Art for All

The State of American Art Museum Collections in the 1870s

The Need for Greater Support for the Fine Arts in Nineteenth-Century America

Why Art? The Common Person and Fine Art

Advocating for Free Access to Art in the United States

III. Advocacy for the Rights of Women (Artists)

Alcott Nieriker on Art Educational Opportunities for Women in Boston and London

Alcott Nieriker on Parisian Studio Conditions for Women Artists

More Difficulties in Paris: American Women Artists and the Nude Model

Advocating for Change

Conclusion: The Transformational Legacy of May Alcott Nieriker’s Travel Writings

I. Assessing the Notoriety and Possible Influence of Alcott Nieriker’s Travel Writings

II. Advice Literature for Artists after Alcott Nieriker

III. The Possible Impacts of Alcott Nieriker’s Travel Writings on Artists and the Art World

IV. The Modern Legacy of Alcott Nieriker’s Travel Writings

Appendix A: May Alcott Nieriker’s Travel Writings

A.1. A Trip to St. Bernard (1870)

A.2. How We Saw the Shah (1873)

A.3. A Letter from an Art Student in London (1873)

A.4. A Hint to London Visitors (1873)

A.5. London Bridges (1874)

A.6. Unpublished Letter to The Boston Evening Transcript, Paris (November 25, 1876)

A.7. May Alcott Nieriker, quoted at length in a newspaper article about J. M. W. Turner [1879]

Bibliography

Index

FIGURES

1. May Alcott, frontispiece from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women , vol. 1, Roberts Brothers, 1869

2. May Alcott Nieriker, Venetian Scene I

3. May Alcott Nieriker, Venetian Landscape after J.M.W. Turner’s St. Benedetto

4. May Alcott Nieriker, Still Life with Fruit and Bottle , 1877

5. May Alcott Nieriker, Négresse , 1879

6. Rosa Peckham, May Alcott , 1877

7. Alice Bartlett and May Alcott Traveling Abroad, 1870

8. May Alcott Nieriker, watercolor paint box

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

One of the great joys of working on a book about May Alcott Nieriker was finding out how many people shared my interest in her life story and career, who in turn generously shared their expertise and enthusiasm for the project. Some of those individuals have been acknowledged in the following footnotes, but others deserve particular attention. This is especially true for staff at four institutions with close ties to the Alcott family: Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House (Concord, MA) and executive director Jan Turnquist; the Fruitlands Museum (Harvard, MA) and curator Shana Dumont Garr and collections manager Anna Thompson; the Concord Free Public Library; and Houghton Library at Harvard University, where May’s voice can be best heard today. I would like to particularly acknowledge former Orchard House guide Betty Damon, who helped to orient me to all things Alcott during my first visit to Concord, Massachusetts.

Various colleagues and scholars have also been particularly helpful and supportive along the way. I am very grateful to Stacey Aronson, Amanda Burdan, Pieranna Garavaso, Katherine Manthorne, Catherine Rivard, and Susan Waller.

This book would not have been possible without research funding from the University of Minnesota, and from my home campus, the University of Minnesota, Morris. In addition, I was fortunate to have highly capable student assistants work on various aspects of the project, and to whom I am immensely grateful; they included Connor Fitzgerald, Zoey Cook, Rachel Kollar, Destinee Oitzinger, Jennifer Riestenberg, and Susan Robertson. Virtually every staff person at the Briggs Library, University of Minnesota, Morris, also played a significant role in facilitating my research, but special thanks go to LeAnn Dean and Sandra Kill, who went above and beyond their normal duties during the pandemic year of 2020.

I’m also very grateful to Anthem Press for accepting my manuscript, and for their thorough and efficient assistance in bringing it to fruition; special thanks go to Senior Acquisitions Editor Megan Grieving, the very helpful feedback from external readers, and the copyeditor Smitha P. S. Finally, I truly appreciate the support of family and friends, which helped me get through the final stages of this project during very challenging times.

INTRODUCTION

There is nothing like travel for bringing out one’s character and improving one’s mind.

—May Alcott,

Bex (Switzerland), July 26, 1870¹

It isn’t a mere pleasure trip to me, girls, […] It will decide my career, for if I have any genius, I shall find it out in Rome, and will do something to prove it.² Thus comments Amy, the young artist of the four March sisters in Louisa May Alcott’s nineteenth-century American novel Little Women, after finding out that she will be accompanying her aunt on a trip to Europe. Written in 1869, this fictive declaration encapsulates the determination and passion that led May Alcott Nieriker (Louisa’s youngest sister who was the inspiration for the character of Amy) to travel and study abroad in Europe in the 1870s, given the limitations she experienced in America. In fact, May would make three independent trips abroad in order to study watercolor painting in Rome and London, and oil painting in Paris, thanks to funding from Louisa and her own art sales. Ultimately, Alcott Nieriker was able to establish a reputation both in Europe and the United States as a highly regarded copyist of J. M. W. Turner’s avant-garde paintings as well as for her original work, which included two paintings accepted into the internationally renowned Paris Salon.

Yet studying and creating art weren’t sufficient for Alcott Nieriker, who simultaneously wrote five travel articles, a 300-page travelogue, and an influential travel guidebook during the 1870s. One might wonder why May bothered to do this, not only due to her dedication to studying and creating art but also given the overabundance of travel literature in the nineteenth century, of which she was well aware.³ As I will demonstrate in May Alcott Nieriker, Author and Advocate, travel writing wasn’t a sideline for the artist or something that she merely dabbled in, as it was for many travelers of the period. Rather, this activity was intimately connected to her identities as an artist and as an American woman who wished to speak out about injustices that she and others experienced, in order to attempt to effect change.

IPrevious Scholarship on the Travel Writings of May Alcott Nieriker

In the art historical literature, May Alcott Nieriker has received more attention to date for what she wrote rather than what she painted—even though her esteemed reputation as a Turner copyist and the fact that she had two paintings accepted into the highly competitive Paris Salon are still acknowledged.⁴ The emphasis on Alcott Nieriker’s written observations is, I believe, largely due to the astonishing candor of her insights regarding the Parisian art world, and especially the often discriminatory studio conditions that women artists experienced there. Alcott Nieriker embedded this critical commentary in her very practical travel guidebook, Studying Art Abroad and How to Do It Cheaply (1879), which can be readily found today in digital and reprint copies. Additional insightful comments about the art world are found in Alcott Nieriker’s correspondence, some of which have been partially published in Caroline Ticknor’s essential (but undocumented) biography of the artist, and in art historical anthologies of primary sources.⁵ Indeed, other than her contemporary Russian colleague, Marie Bashkirtseff (1858–1884), who similarly wrote about the challenges she faced as a female art student living in Paris,⁶ there are few other women artists of the period who are as frequently quoted as May.

My first exposure to Alcott Nieriker as a travel writer occurred while reading the art historical survey text, Women, Art, and Society, by Whitney Chadwick. There, Chadwick highlights Alcott Nieriker’s contributions to our knowledge of inequities in the Parisian art world, and also discusses the difficulties that May and other women faced regarding the social expectation to choose between having a career outside the home and being married with familial obligations.⁷ Wendy Slatkin’s brief identification of Studying Art Abroad in her Voices of Women Artists as a valuable document of the growing feminist awareness among women artists by the last decades of the nineteenth century (p. 126) also stimulated my interest in the artist, and particularly informed the perspective of my essay, Empowering American Women Artists: The Travel Writings of May Alcott Nieriker. In that essay I primarily consider how Alcott Nieriker used the vehicle of travel writing to articulate the abilities and needs of women artists at a time when they faced discrimination in the art world, and how she strongly advocated for change.

Studying Art Abroad, given its distinction as the first travel guidebook written by an American woman artist, and expressly for women artists, has also received some attention in the related fields of American literature and travel writing studies, although in a more limited way than one might expect. Somewhat surprisingly, Alcott Nieriker’s travel writings have thus far largely escaped the notice of scholars who have addressed gender issues in American travel writing of the nineteenth century. Yet that aspect of travel writing has at the same time not received sufficient study; as Susan Roberson noted in a 2009 essay, Even though women have shared in experiences of travel with men, much of the critical attention to travel has focused on the male traveler or a male paradigm of travel.⁸

More positively, Alcott Nieriker is included in the substantial American Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide from Colonial Times to the Present, where her Studying Art Abroad is praised as a delightful book, high-spirited guide, and sprightly social history, imbued throughout with the author’s strong, essentially feminist sense of self.⁹ An entry on Travel Writing in The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the U.S. also highlights the importance of Studying Art Abroad, noting that in it Nieriker’s feminism corrects yet confirms the ‘Daisy Millerism’ of the late nineteenth century.¹⁰ In William W. Stowe’s fundamental study, Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture, Alcott Nieriker’s guidebook receives significant attention given the broad scope of his work.¹¹ There Stowe praises Studying Art Abroad (along with Mary Cadwalader Jones’s European Travel for Women, published in 1900) as being remarkable chiefly for their assumption of female independence and their matter-of-fact acceptance of European customs and conditions.¹² Indeed, although May was not always confident about solo travel on the European continent herself, in her travel writings she consistently asserts the ability of women to do so safely, which contradicted the gendered societal norm of the period. Equally unusual was May’s openness to European cultures and otherness, given that many American travel writers used the Old World as a negative foil against which the democratic advances of the New World were championed.¹³ However, as I will demonstrate throughout this book, Alcott Nieriker was not always matter-of-fact in her discussion of European difference, for oftentimes she effusively praised much of this alterity, whether aesthetic, pragmatic, or sociological in nature.

Finally, a few studies have focused specifically on one of May Alcott Nieriker’s examples of travel writing. Daniel Shealy has provided an excellent, thoroughly annotated compendium of May’s (and Louisa’s) letters from their Grand Tour of Europe in his Little Women Abroad: The Alcott Sisters’ Letters from Europe, 1870–1871 (2008). This volume is also enriched by the copious inclusion of May’s sketches from the trip, but what is of particular interest in respect to my research is how her approach to travel writing contrasts to that of Louisa, which I will explore in Chapter 2.

May and Louisa more directly interacted in the lengthy unpublished manuscript An Artist’s Holiday, which is generally thought to have been primarily written by May while she was in England from 1873 to 1874, but with some editorial interventions by Louisa. An important thematic study of this manuscript is provided in Judy Bullington’s dissertation The Artist-as-Traveler and Expanding Horizons of American Cosmopolitanism in the Gilded Age.¹⁴ More recently, Marlowe Daly-Galeano has considered the interdisciplinary interactions of the two sisters in her essay Disciplinary Conversations: May Alcott Nieriker’s ‘An Artist’s Holiday.’¹⁵

The unique contributions of Alcott Nieriker’s Studying Art Abroad guidebook has been the main subject of two studies to date. Debra A. Corcoran’s Another Dimension of Women’s Education: May Alcott’s Guide to Studying Art Abroad,¹⁶ primarily summarizes the guidebook’s contents but also emphasizes the importance of this publication from an art historical perspective. In my article "The Multivalence of May Alcott Nieriker’s Studying Art Abroad & How to Do It Cheaply," I examine the layers of content and authorial voice within the guidebook, and demonstrate the originality and possible impact of this work, especially in relation to nineteenth-century travel literature for artists.¹⁷

Building on the work of these and other scholars,¹⁸ the present study thus seeks to significantly expand our comprehension of and appreciation for May Alcott Nieriker’s extant travel writings—and not simply because they are the work of Louisa May Alcott’s sister, but in their own right as expressions of an informed, passionate, and outspoken individual who sought to effect change. This focus on Alcott Nieriker’s contributions is indeed a timely one, as it dovetails with what Azelina Flint recently has identified as a new field of May Alcott Nieriker Studies,¹⁹ which is currently experiencing a surge of scholarly interest.²⁰

II Defining May Alcott Nieriker’s Travel Writing

A key contribution of the present study is that it identifies and makes fully available (in appendix A) more examples of Alcott Nieriker’s travel writing—specifically, five published articles based on her travels that previously could only be found in microfilm, or in some cases were misattributed to her sister Louisa. Yet here it might be useful to clarify my usage of travel writing, given the elusiveness of a standard definition, as Carl Thompson, Tim Youngs, and other scholars have discussed.²¹ To a great degree this ambiguity is due to the heterogeneous nature of the genre, which can be wide-ranging in form and style.²² Alcott Nieriker’s travel writings are a perfect example of this variability, for they can take the forms of epistolary correspondence, adventure narrative, advice literature, travelogue, and guidebook. Her authorial voice can be just as mutable, shifting even within the same newspaper article from humorous and lighthearted to frank and even accusatory, depending on her topic. Yet within this mélange, what unifies Alcott Nieriker’s travel writing is that these writings were all composed while she lived abroad in Europe, were based on firsthand observations and experiences, and had the intention of not only entertaining but especially informing her middle-class audience about the opportunities to study art in England, France, and Italy. Most of these characteristics align with an influential conceptualization of travel writing put forward by Paul Fussell.²³

III Contents, Contexts, and Methodologies

Just as May Alcott Nieriker’s travel writings can’t be confined to a single subgenre, their subjects similarly expand beyond what might be considered typical content, such as observational descriptions and the provision of travel tips and information. Although Alcott Nieriker does include the latter in some of her writings, she also addresses an intriguing range of topics, such as the empowerment of solo female travelers, discrimination faced by women artists, foreign food and fashion, art criticism, and the need for greater support for the arts in the United States. Her interests are thus clearly multidisciplinary, yet in their fluidity of approach might also be considered transdisciplinary. Azelina Flint has argued that Alcott Nieriker (and her works, I would add) exemplifies this methodology because she not only exists ‘between disciplines,’ but also straddles national borders, cultures and separate spheres, inhabiting ‘different levels of reality.’²⁴ The contents of this book thus reflect this multifaceted nature of Alcott Nieriker and her travel writings in terms of its organization and application of various methodologies, and intersect with numerous fields of study, including art history, gender studies, nineteenth-century transatlantic studies, expatriate studies, and travel writing studies.

In The Transnational Artist (Chapter 1) I first provide an interpretation of May Alcott Nieriker’s life from the standpoint of her artistic transformation and how that was greatly enhanced by her studies in Europe. It is not intended to be a complete artistic biography, which would require a separate volume to fully explore her work. My study of Alcott Nieriker’s art has been complicated by the fact that to date she has been the subject of just two exhibitions,²⁵ and no illustrated catalogues or monographs. Much of Alcott Nieriker’s artwork can be seen on the walls of her family home of Orchard House (Concord, MA), with other examples in the Fruitlands Museum (Harvard, MA), but an untold number of paintings remain in private hands. Despite any resulting shortcomings, it is hoped that this chapter will serve as a springboard for more comprehensive studies in the future.

In the process of studying and living abroad May also transformed as an individual, a development that I first reconstruct in a visual analysis of two of her portraits. In particular, Rosa Peckham’s captivating portrayal of May, created while they were roommates in Paris, is the subject of close visual as well as biographical scrutiny centering on the performative aspects of this image, for through it May sought to express an idealized identity as a successful Parisian artist. Indeed, this was not the only instance in which May used fashion to perform a role, for even in public settings she realized the ways that visual appearance could communicate a desire to stand out from her peers, or could enable her to merge more seamlessly with others around her in different European venues.

Yet along with these external changes, May also experienced a substantive shift in her personal identities as a single woman, and as an American. Her epistolary correspondence and diary entries are closely examined to trace the development of a transnational identity, a concept that has entered recently into the field of travel writing scholarship.²⁶ To a large degree May’s love of European life and culture were enhanced by a desire for personal freedom, which she found constrained in her American life, where she was regularly needed to attend to the Alcott household, especially at times when Louisa was unable to do so. May also desperately wished to live where the arts were an integral and accepted part of life, rather than contend with the discouraging lack of support for fine art in the United States. Even though May sought to improve the climate for the arts in America, she gradually came to the realization that an artistic life was really only possible in Europe. What cemented her transnational identity and even pushed it in the direction of expatriatism, however, was her sudden romance and marriage to a young Swiss businessman, Ernest Nieriker. Even more surprising is that at the time of their union May was an admitted spinster of 38 years of age, while Ernest was only 22. However, the death of her mother while May was in London opened her heart to a profound love that transcended nationality and age thanks to the couple’s common interest in the arts, and thereby significantly transformed her life.

But now May’s personal identity faced another challenge, and that was whether she could continue her artistic career while also taking on the roles of wife, household manager, and eventual mother-to-be. In this way, she represents a transitional figure between two diametrically opposed stereotypes of American womanhood that emerged in the nineteenth century: first there was the so-called True Woman (and said to be primarily an antebellum type, although it did persist after the Civil War),²⁷ who embodied the role of passive caretaker of husband, family, and household, and thus did not have an occupation outside the home. By 1890 the New Woman type was identified in mainstream media, and inspired by the nineteenth-century women’s suffrage movement, the American woman now could be seen as capable, independent, active, and able to pursue a professional career outside of the home.²⁸ As Judy Bullington has noted, May Alcott Nieriker chronologically straddled these stereotypes,²⁹ and lived with the inner conflict of desiring a professional career as an artist while also wishing to be married with children. Yet literary portrayals of the period, such as Elizabeth Phelps’s The Story of Avis (1877), dramatized that it was impossible for a woman to be both happily married and a successful professional artist; something (or someone) had to be rejected. Instead, May argued that this was a false dichotomy, believing that under the right circumstances, it was possible for women to succeed in both roles—and she set out to prove just that in France, with the support of her husband. Would her experiment, as May called it, have succeeded if she had lived longer? Unfortunately, May Alcott Nieriker’s premature death at the age of 39 prevents us from knowing, but her strong determination to succeed in both roles suggests that it was very possible.

Following this foundational biographical chapter, Chapters 2, 3, and 4 will explore different aspects of May Alcott Nieriker’s travel writings. Using methodologies such as historical criticism and sociohistorical analysis, I will demonstrate how her words pushed the boundaries of societal norms and expectations for women as artists, writers, travelers, and individuals. In The Travel Writer(Chapter 2) I first summarize the historical contexts that spurred opportunities for women both as travelers and as travel writers. Some of May’s ambivalent experiences as a solo female European traveler will also be discussed here, given that taking on this identity was relatively unusual for the period. Attention will then turn to Alcott Nieriker’s travel writings in their different forms, and especially consider the ways in which the author rhetorically seeks to persuade us of the abilities, and needs, of contemporary women artists. What I find particularly striking about her work is that Alcott Nieriker primarily writes to empower her female, middle-class readers, thereby standing out from the ubiquitous autobiographical reflections of other travel writers. This is especially evident in her Studying Art Abroad guidebook, which will thus receive the most attention in this chapter, including a discussion of its publication history and literary reception.

In The Art Critic and Commentator (Chapter 3), many of these same travel writings, as well as an article on J. M. W. Turner by Alcott Nieriker, will be considered from the lens of art criticism. In her writing we do not encounter the voice of a typical nineteenth-century American traveler expressing an uneducated opinion when art is encountered abroad; rather, Alcott Nieriker’s art commentary and criticism, coming at a time in which women were just beginning to venture into this male-dominated field, is knowledgeable, specific, and forceful. I will discuss three main thrusts to her criticism and commentary, all of which concerned topics that were both timely and controversial. First, there was the contemporary state of British watercolor painting, which in that period was divided among practitioners who advocated for a looser, more painterly application of paint and those who preferred a more opaque and detailed paint application. As we will see, even though Alcott Nieriker was far from established in this field of painting herself, she articulated a strong preference within her published travel writing for the more painterly approach, since she believed this method was truer to the inherently transparent medium.

Alcott Nieriker’s stylistic preference also aligns with the second trend in her artistic commentary, which was a passionate defense of the controversial painting style of British artist J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851). May writes about his work to a greater or lesser extent in five different examples of her travel writing, making it one of the most dominant topics that she undertakes. Studying and copying Turner paintings was also the focus of her time in London, and thus she was intimately familiar with his avant-garde technique, which was still the subject of artistic debate some twenty years after his death. Alcott Nieriker’s critical bravery in advocating for Turner’s approach, especially as an unknown female artist, is an exceptionally important aspect of her travel writing, and will be discussed in depth here for the first time.

Another very significant aspect of Alcott Nieriker’s art-writing is her analysis and articulation of the styles of contemporaneous women artists, especially Rosa Bonheur and Mary Cassatt. These commentaries, which also came to be incorporated into her published travel writing, were largely unparalleled at the time in their defense of the abilities of women artists. As commonly occurs in the field of historical criticism, I will not only examine what Alcott Nieriker wrote, but also how she wrote, and especially consider her choice of stylistic vocabulary in describing aesthetic preferences. This same analytical method will then be applied to Alcott Nieriker’s autocriticism, which recurs in her epistolary correspondence, and provides us with additional insight concerning how May perceived the strength of her creative work in relation to that of her peers, and in turn, how she saw herself.

May Alcott Nieriker was not content to limit her critical comments to the rarified atmosphere of aesthetic judgments, however. In The Social Justice Advocate (Chapter 4), I examine the underlying issues and experiences regarding race, class, and gender inequities that motivated Alcott Nieriker as an artist, a writer, and an individual. Growing up in mid-nineteenth century America, and especially in a family who were staunch abolitionists and social reformers, it is perhaps unsurprising that May held strong opinions about the rights of underprivileged and marginalized people, but what might be more surprising is that throughout her life, both in actions, words, and art, she acted upon those beliefs. Section I of this chapter considers Alcott Nieriker’s lifelong empathy for the human rights and dignity of Black individuals she encountered, first as a child and young adult in Massachusetts, and later in life as an art

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