Watercolor on ivory, signed and dated J D Rice / 1905 to right edge, presented in a silver locket (unmarked, acid tested silver), within a bifold presentation case fitted with aubergine velvet and silk interior.

Locket 4 1/8 x 3 in.; painting 3 1/8 x 2 1/2 in.

Collection of a Gentleman

Jenny Delony was born in Washington (Hempstead County) on May 13, 1866, to Alchyny Turner Delony, a capitalist, lawyer, and educator, and Elizabeth Lawson Pearson Delony, a teacher. Jenny attended Wesleyan Female Institute (Stuart Hall) in Staunton, Virginia, probably from 1878 to 1882. She won gold medals there in both art and music. Delony began her professional study at Cincinnati Academy of Art from 1886 to 1888. At least two years followed in Paris, where Delony studied at the Académie Julian, the Académie Delécluse, and in the atelier of painter Paul Délance. She studied at the St. Louis School of Art from March 14, 1892, to February 10, 1893, and studied in Venice sometime prior to 1895 with Italian genre painter Stefano Novo. In 1896, she was one of the first women admitted to the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, and also one of the first women to study anatomy at the École de Médecine in Paris. Delony studied under the American painter William Merritt Chase, and was his personal secretary at the Chase Art School, also called Shinnecock, at Southampton on Long Island.

Delony married twice, her first to Nathaniel J. Rice of Denver, Colorado, on December 10, 1891. He died within two years of their marriage. Her second marriage was to prominent New Yorker Paul A. Meyrowitz, on November 19, 1910, and they separated in the early 1920s.

Delony established her first professional art studio in 1891 in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her second studio in Little Rock in 1897 occupied suites twenty-eight and twenty-nine of the Masonic Temple on Main Street.

During the 1880s and 1890s, she painted portraits of many of the most distinguished citizens. She represented the state regionally and nationally at various exhibitions: the New Orleans Cotton Centennial Exposition (1885), the State Exposition in Little Rock (1887), the Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893), and the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta (1895). She won premiums for many works exhibited.

Rice taught art in Virginia for three years, first at Virginia Female Institute in Roanoke (1893-1894), then Norfolk College for Young Ladies in Norfolk (1894-1896). From 1897 to 1900, Rice was the first Director of Art for Arkansas Industrial University, which became during her tenure the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County). There, she founded the art department and the first baccalaureate art program in the state.

Rice left Fayetteville to set up a studio in New York in 1900. In 1903, she exhibited at the National Academy of Arts. Her miniature of Queen Victoria was exhibited at Tiffany's. Many examples of Rice's work can be viewed today in public collections.

Good estate condition.

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