“Juliette Gordon Low”
For today, a little more about the sitter than the artist…
“Juliette Gordon Low” is a lovely oil on canvas portrait by the English artist, Edward Robert Hughes, from 1887. Juliette Gordon Low founded the Girl Scouts of the USA in 1913. She came from a wealthier American family that had this painting commissioned just a year after Juliette’s marriage and subsequent move to the United Kingdom. It remained at her family home in Savannah, Georgia.
Hughes was associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Aesthetic movements that took place in England in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Hughes was part of the second generation of artists that propagated the Pre-Raphaelite ideals and aesthetics. Throughout his career, to supplement his income, he painted traditional oil portraits that were commissioned by the upper-class citizens of English society, such as this one here.
Low was inspired after meeting the founder of the British Boy Scouts, Sir Robert Baden Powell, in 1911 when she was living in. Powell introduced Low to his sister, Agnes, who had started the British Girl Guides. Low worked with Agnes for a while, becoming a troop leader in Scotland and then founding troops in London, England. When she returned back home to the United States in 1912, she founded the American Girl Guides which was renamed to the Girl Scouts of the USA in 1913.
Here’s an interesting, yet sad fact about Low. She had poor hearing partly due to an unfortunate event at her very own wedding when a grain of rice thrown at the couple got lodged in her ear, punctured her eardrum, and got infected. This kept her sequestered in hospital visits during the earliest years of her marriage, and a rift was developed between husband and wife that never healed.
“Juliette Gordon Low” is currently in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. in the United States.
For more on Edward Robert Hughes, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
