Gladys Nelson Smith was an active figure painter and landscapist in Washington, D.C., from 1925 to 1941. She was graduated from the University of Kansas, where she trained as an art teacher with William V. Cahill (d. 1924) and other artists known for their impressionist landscape paintings. She enrolled for a short time at the Art Students League in New York in 1918 but returned with her husband to Kansas the following year. In 1923 they moved to Chicago, where she attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1924 and studied with LEOPOLD SEYFFERT and Karl Albert Buehr (1866-1952). She was successful in selling her paintings in both Kansas and Chicago and in 1921 began a more than twenty-year association with the What-Not Shop, an art gallery in Topeka, Kansas.

Early in 1924 the Smiths moved to Washington, D.C. Gladys studied portraiture for several years at the Corcoran School of Art. Among her teachers there were EDMUND TARBELL, Richard Meryman (1882-1963), and Samuel Burtis Baker (1882-1967). In December 1930 Smith brought her studies to a close with a trip to Europe to visit museums and galleries. In 1932 she joined the Society of Washington Artists and thereafter became active in several other local groups, among them the Art League of Washington, the Arts Club, and Twenty Women Painters.

The decade of the 1930s was Smith’s most productive and successful period. She received numerous portrait commissions and became well known for her images of children. She also painted still lifes, city genre scenes, and landscapes. The last led the Smiths to purchase a farm in Frederick County, Maryland, and five years later they moved to Chevy Chase. Although she continued to paint until the 1970s, the artist’s removal from Washington as well as the increasing popularity of the modernist Washington color school resulted in her feeling isolated, and she consequently withdrew from professional circles.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Silver Spring, Md., Josephine Nelson Collection, European travel diary of Gladys Nelson Smith § Washington, D.C., Corcoran Gallery of Art, Gladys Nelson Smith, exh. cat., 1984, with essays by Linda Crocker Simmons and Josephine Nelson, chronology, list of exhibitions.