Kate Freeman Clark (American-Holly Springs, Mississippi, 1875-1957), The Nut Trees, Marsh Meadows, oil on canvas, signed lower right, titled and inscribed additionally Alfred H's lower lot, original label verso, illegible pencil inscription and price, E275.00 on stretcher verso, 20 in. x 26 in., in the original giltwood frame. E10000-15000 Provenance: Private Collection, New York. Note: Brought up in Vicksburg and Holly Springs from a prominent Mississippi family Kate Freeman Clark attended finishing school in New York at the Gardner Institute. After graduating in 1894, she entered the Art Students League where she studied with Irving Ramsay Wiles and John Twachtman, but was most profoundly influenced by William Merritt Chase and became one of his favorite students as well as close friends. She studied year round with Chase, and received instruction in plein-air painting at the Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art 1896-1902, drawing much inspiration from the beauty of Long Island. Clark often painted seasonal variations of the same landscape. The Nut Trees is an autumn version of a similar scene depicted in summer, Marsh Meadows, featured on the cover of the 1996 Lauren Rogers Museum of Art exhibition catalog. Clark began signing her work Freeman Clark to mask her gender and exhibited over a twenty-year period at institutions including the Boston Art Club, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Corcoran Gallery, the Carnegie Institute, the New York School of Art, the National Academy of Design, and the Society of American Artists. Kathleen McClain Jenkins notes in her essay in the 1996 LRMA exhibition catalog that Clark sent selected paintings to a few private galleries but elite social mores may have forbidden Clark to sell her works, as proper ladies were not allowed to engage in trade. The price on this painting indicates it was one of those rare works offered for sale. After her mentor Chase's death in 1916, she exhibited for the last time at the Men's City Club of New York in 1918. When her mother died in 1922, Clark gave up painting, put her work in storage in a New York warehouse, and returned to her family home in Holly Springs, where she lived a sheltered, genteel life. Very few of Clark's paintings have ever been in circulation outside of the collection of over 1,000 works now housed at the Kate Freeman Clark Art Gallery in Holly Springs, established after her death. Ref: Summers of ’96 The Shinnecock Revisited: The Inspiration of Kate Freeman Clark by William Merritt Chase, Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, 1996; Art in Mississippi, 1720-1980, Patti Carr Black, 1998; Kate Freeman Clark: A Painter Rediscovered, Cynthia Grant Tucker, 1981.,; Bea Green, Curator, Kate Freeman Clark Art Gallery, Holly Springs, Mississippi.