Fern Isabel Coppedge 1883-1951
Works
Biography
Photo of Fern Isabel Coppedge
Fern Isabel Coppedge is arguably the most unique and unusual of all the Pennsylvania Impressionists. She studied under many different teachers, including William Merritt Chase and Daniel Garber, and attended numerous art institutions, such as the Art Institute of Chicago and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Yet Coppedge’s work was not remotely derivative, and she developed a distinctive painterly voice that went far beyond the relatively traditional training that she received. She once remarked how even as a child, she always saw the world differently: “People used to think me queer when I was a little girl because I saw deep purples and reds and violets in a field of snow.”
Coppedge first visited New Hope in 1917, and three years later, she moved to Lumberville, Pennsylvania, where she purchased a home near Garber’s residence. Like the other members of the New Hope School, Coppedge was a plein-air painter and preferred to work directly from nature. However, she did not restrict herself to a literal translation of it. Rather, her paintings depart from the realist tradition and take on a highly personal note, particularly due to her use of an iridescent and vibrant palette. Her broad brushwork and flat application of paint are vastly different from the short, broken brushwork of French Impressionism and owe more to the influence of the Fauves.
Coppedge is best known for her winter and autumnal views of the New Hope landscape. Through her innovative use of color she created landscape compositions that were as dynamic as they were original. Occasionally, she refrained from mixing colors on the palette, preferring instead to load the pure pigment directly onto her brushes right from the tube. Indeed, over the course of her career, her color became rooted less in nature and more in her imagination. The New Hope modernist Lloyd Ney praised her late paintings for this quality, remarking: “Here in these later works we see a purity of color, a sparkle of pigmentation that takes it farther away from the imitative.”
Coppedge first visited New Hope in 1917, and three years later, she moved to Lumberville, Pennsylvania, where she purchased a home near Garber’s residence. Like the other members of the New Hope School, Coppedge was a plein-air painter and preferred to work directly from nature. However, she did not restrict herself to a literal translation of it. Rather, her paintings depart from the realist tradition and take on a highly personal note, particularly due to her use of an iridescent and vibrant palette. Her broad brushwork and flat application of paint are vastly different from the short, broken brushwork of French Impressionism and owe more to the influence of the Fauves.
Coppedge is best known for her winter and autumnal views of the New Hope landscape. Through her innovative use of color she created landscape compositions that were as dynamic as they were original. Occasionally, she refrained from mixing colors on the palette, preferring instead to load the pure pigment directly onto her brushes right from the tube. Indeed, over the course of her career, her color became rooted less in nature and more in her imagination. The New Hope modernist Lloyd Ney praised her late paintings for this quality, remarking: “Here in these later works we see a purity of color, a sparkle of pigmentation that takes it farther away from the imitative.”
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