Here is an etching entitled entitled Needles signed Elsa S Milius and dated 1928. I'm guessing that the title refers to the town in California. Not much is known about the artist Elsa Simmons Milius and I wondered how much I could find out about her. I started with the web site Ask Art, which states that there is an entry for her in Who Was Who in American Art, 1564-1975 by Peter Hastings Falk, but I can find no auction records or examples of her work.
I emailed the library at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and received a photo of the entry in Who Was Who..
My friend Anne, a former reporter, unearthed these facts from newspaper articles available through ancestry.com :
She is actually Elsa SIMONSON Melius, born Dec. 24,1889. She married her husband Lester at Delmonico's in NY in Feb. 1910. They had a daughter, Winifred and son, Robert.
She had an exhibition at the Artists' Galleries in NYC in 1923 and traveled to Europe in 1929 and 1930. She died in 1933, leaving an estate worth $346,243; unfortunately all but $3,174 of that was the mortgage on her half interest in the Hotel Winthrop on Lexington in NYC.
So this is how to research an artist and obtain the raw data for a biography. Unfortunately the source of her training as an artist is still unknown, a type of fact is included in most artist biographies. If anyone has more information about this artist or additional photos of her work. Please email me at pcurtiss60@gmail.com.
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