Josephine Sibley Couper
(1867 - 1957 )

-- Michael J. McCue

In 1934 successful painter J.S. Couper (as she signed her works) moved permanently to Tryon, North Carolina. It was the same year, coincidentally, as the death of that art colony’s founder, Amelia Watson, who had reflected the New England roots of the Tryon art community. Couper represented its increasingly Southern tone in the Thirties and Forties, as well as Tryon’s growing appeal as a year-round residence. She purchased the Rock House next to the Oak Hall Hotel, and added a studio window for north light. From the vantage point of its elevated verandah, in the heart of the village overlooking the train depot, reigned the grande dame from Georgia. Impeccably dressed and wearing white gloves, the regal Couper would nod, raise her gold-knobbed walking stick, or speak to acknowledge passersby according to their age, their rank, and her favor.

Josephine Sibley was the fifteenth child of Massachusetts native Josiah Sibley, who made a vast fortune in Augusta, Georgia both before and after the War Between the States. He was an abolitionist who freed his slaves, educated them for trades, and financed their commercial establishment in Liberia for those wishing to return to Africa. Though Sibley foresaw the inevitable defeat of the South in armed conflict, he was a staunch partisan in his financial support of the Confederacy. Five of his sons fought for the South. After the War he astutely recouped his commercial position. Josephine grew up a daughter of wealth in a mansion filled with art.

At 12 she made her first tour of Europe with her family, and the magnificence of the Old World’s art made a great impression on her. She let it be known she wanted art lessons, so an instructor was engaged. After that she never stopped sketching and painting. At 18 she was studying with a friend of John Singer Sargent’s, fresh from Paris. Her father built a studio for her on the grounds of the Augusta mansion, and had the roof torn open for her attic studio at their other home in the Georgia countryside. In 1886 Josephine enrolled in a Charleston art academy, but soon announced her desire to go on to New York.

At the Art Students’ League, then at the center of all that was going on in American art, she studied with William Merritt Chase (1849-1916), who was highly supportive of her talent. She came to know many influential people in New York. Her background and scruples, however, kept her from attending an important composition class scheduled for 7 p.m. -- because she believed that no proper lady could be on the streets unescorted in the evening. In 1890 she went to Europe again, sketching as she went and developing her interest in depicting the human form.

The next year she married cotton broker Butler King Couper. They lived first in Marietta near Atlanta. In 1901 the family moved to Spartanburg. In the growing South Carolina city Mrs. Couper was active in the arts, helping to found its Arts and Crafts Club. One of her projects was a major 1907 show of work by contemporary painters -- Chase, Elliott Daingerfield, and Robert Henri among them. The organizers personally raised the considerable sum necessary to purchase a Henri picture for the city, which remains the keystone painting in Spartanburg’s museum. While living there, Couper studied art under Daingerfield. It is believed she met him in nearby Tryon, as well as at his residence in Blowing Rock, further away and higher up in the North Carolina mountains.

She was most interested in experimenting with color, and in capturing character in portrait. Couper exhibited with the Society of Independent Artists in New York and frequently elsewhere on the Eastern seaboard. Requests came from museums for inclusion in their collections. Proceeds from commissions, except for her expenses for supplies, were donated to charities. She was a member of the National Arts Club, the Southern States Art League, and other artists’ organizations.

Her husband died in 1913, and when her children matured she moved in 1922 to Montreat, the resort of Southern Presbyterians in the mountains near Asheville. She painted energetically, and spent considerable time in Massachusetts while her son was a student at MIT. In the summers she studied at Gloucester under Hugh Breckenridge (1870-1937), the important Post-Impressionist and influential teacher. At the Gloucester artists’ colony she was in the circle of modernists who were changing the look of American painting. Couper’s own style changed too.

In 1929 and 1930, in France, she painted and studied under Andre Lhote (1885-1962), a theoretician who credited Impressionism with having begun the Cubist rejection of visual reality. Lhote pushed her to experiment with abstraction. One of her stylized, modernist paintings was included in the Salon d’Automne in Paris. Around this time she had five one-person shows in New York. She also did a solo exhibition at Atlanta’s High Museum. One of her paintings of the North Carolina mountains was reproduced as a cover for Literary Digest. Couper is known to have spent time at Tryon before 1934, and by that time -- when she decided to settle there permanently -- it was a magnet for artists both Northern and Southern in origin, with a good reputation as a workplace and for its company of cosmopolitan people. To her Rock House studio she brought paintings and painters from New York. She hosted a solo show for Charles Aiken (1872-1965), a founder of The Fifteen Gallery in Manhattan. In turn, from her Tryon base she traveled often to see her wide network of acquaintances in the art world.

Couper painted vigorously in Tryon, frequently at such a pace that she did not complete everything she started. In the 2001 retrospective group show Tryon Artists 1892-1942, one of her typical unfinished canvases was included, a portrait of Holland Brady as a Boy Scout, along with her preliminary head study of the Tryon boy. Once she had captured the subject’s mood and character, she felt no more was required. Prominent people she painted in Tryon included Nancy Langhorne of Virginia, the mother of Nora Flynn, Lady Astor, and Mrs. Charles Dana Gibson. When she was not working on a commission she would paint whomever struck her fancy. Couper worked standing erect, with minimum conversation, but with real pleasure in the work and rapport with her subject.

Her later Tryon local landscapes, such as Pink Rhododendron from Gillette Woods (circa 1945) are stylized and uncomplicated compared to landscapes of her earlier periods. Other Couper paintings from the period of her long Tryon residency show strong feelings for the effects of the Depression and a new interest in the rural South -- probably influenced by her close artist friend Margaret Law. Couper painted fine townscapes of Charleston, where she kept a winter studio, and there she volunteered one night a week at the Crittenden home for unwed mothers. Shortly before her death she told her son that she had finally overcome her “pride of class.”

The most extensive public collection of Couper’s oeuvre is owned by the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Macon, Georgia. Other institutions with her paintings include the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, the Sweat Memorial Galleries in Portland, Maine, and the art museums of Brooklyn, Spartanburg, Atlanta, and Augusta.