Moy Glidden, Portrait of a St. Croix Woman

Moy Glidden and Jane Piper met in 1935 at Daniel Garber's cast drawing classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In the mid-1930s they left the Academy to study privately with Earl Horter and take classes at the Barnes Foundation. Around this time the two traveled to St. Croix, where these portraits were painted. In a letter from 1999, Glidden recalled, "The model was an old native ‘Cruzian' with whom Jane [Piper] and I had made friends as she sat in daily market with her tray of vegetables and fruit for sale. She was charmed to be asked to pose, and arrived in her best hat trimmed with flowers (bright red was her thing!) accentuated by the dazzling pink dress. She was very sweet and full of fun and posed every morning for a week or two. "Jane and I were both painting very intenselythere -and talked endlessly about it. We were both very much into Gauguin [and] Van Gogh and argued about what color was doing. Yes, we did criticize each other's work but we were so different I don't know how helpful it was.”