Ellen Emmet Rand

This book critically considers the career of Ellen Emmet Rand (1875-1941), one of the most important and prolific portrait painters in the USA in the first decades of the 20th century and reimagines dialogues about women, art, business, and modernism.

Ellen Emmet Rand (1875-1941) was one of the most important and prolific portraitists in the United States in the first decades of the 20th century. She negotiated her career, reputation, family, and finances in modern and commercially savvy ways, revealing the complex negotiations needed to balance these competing pressures. Engaging with newly available archival documents and featuring scholars with radically different approaches to visual culture, this book not only seeks to interrogate the meaning of Rand’s portraits and her career, but indeed to rethink gender, art, race, business, and modernism in the 20th century.