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In Ethel Warwick's Lime Kiln, the artist uses the diagonal of the railroad track not just to divide the foreground from the background, but also to establish a boundary between the warm and cool hues of the upper and lower parts of the canvas. With long, slashing brushstrokes, she lays out an area of orange and green vegetation on the viewer's side of the tracks. Beyond the rails, only the red of the boxcars deviates from the cool blue, grey and bright white forms of the lime kiln, the purplish mounds of material, and the billowing blue-black clouds of smoke that fill the sky. Her use of color has a modernist quality to it, and plays well against the many angles that define the structure and varied massing of the lime plant.
Ethel Herrick Warwick (Mrs. Edward) was born in New York City. She studied at the Moore Institute of Design and later at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Among her mentors were Fred Wagner, H. Breckenridge, H.B. Snell, E. Horter, and E. O'Hara. She was a member of the Philadelphia Plastic Club and the Philadelphia Watercolor Club, and exhibited annually with those organizations, as well as at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and at the Woodmere Art Gallery. Her area of specialty was portrait commissions. Warwick was also one of the first members of the Philadelphia Art Alliance, founded in 1915 and originally located at 1709 Chestnut Street. In 1916 the members of the Art Alliance chose Warwick, who had won the first prize for her painting Battle of the Flowers at the previous year's exhibition, as the recipient of the group's first one-man show, as Theo White in his history of the Art Alliance put it, "truly a distinction."
Sources:
Falk, Peter Hastings, ed. Who Was Who in American Art. Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1985.
White, Theo B. The Philadelphia Art Alliance: Fifty Years 1915-1965. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965.
This document copyright © 1996, Eric John Schruers