Westwind is done in the spirit of the artist’s female allegorical studies published in her 1892 volume In Arcadia, in which several different models wearing similar garments depict ideals such as virtue in landscape scenes taken from Greek mythology. In European Renaissance arts, Arcadia was celebrated as an unspoiled, harmonious wilderness.

This is the fourth photogravure of seven included within Art historian Richard Stettiner’s text essay printed for the portfolio, which can be found under the group heading for this work. Pagination on index page indicates E. J. FARNSWORTH was from Albany, N.Y.

Emma Justine Farnsworth: 1860-1952

From Christine Peterson’s biography of the artist: …Farnsworth, who had modest art training, received a camera outfit as a gift one Christmas and began to use it the following summer. The earliest known record of her exhibiting photographs is the second Joint Exhibition of 1888, where three of her pictures were seen. Over the next five years, she also was successful in two newspaper competitions. Her work consisted primarily of genre scenes and figure studies….Farnsworth drew the attention of Alfred Stieglitz. In 1893, she once again showed in the Joint Exhibition, organized by the country’s three leading camera clubs (in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston) and was the only woman to win a medal, prompting Stieglitz to consider her the country’s strongest lady amateur. In 1897, her work comprised the second in an important series of solo exhibitions presented by the Camera Club of New York, of which Stieglitz was a leading member. And three years later, he included an image by her as a photogravure in the January 1900 issue of Camera Notes, printed in brilliant orange ink.

Farnsworth’s pictures were reproduced most frequently during the 1890s. They appeared in the American Amateur Photographer (1893, 1899), Photographic Times (1891, 1892, 1896, 1899, 1900), and Sun and Shade (1893). They were included in two deluxe portfolios of photogravures, issued on the occasion of Berlin’s annual International Exhibition of Amateur Photography in 1896 and 1897. Two years later, the Camera Club of New York also featured one of her gravures in its portfolio American Pictorial Photography I.