Washington Square, NY

Augusta Payne Rathbone

This Modernist color aquatint and etching is of Washington Square in Greenwich Village in New York. Rather than focus her attention on the iconic Washington Square Arch Rathbone instead chose to depict the colorful row houses on Waverly Place, across from the park.

The park is the center of activity for the Greenwich Village area, bustling with tourists, chess players, artists, students, children and residents enjoying the weather throughout the year. Rathbone depicts a mother and baby carriage in the park in fall. A twisted, skeletal tree stretches into a clouded sky. The mostly red, brick buildings from the houses add a brightness to an otherwise drab day.

The 1833 row of red brick townhouses on the north end of Washington Square Park, known as “Waverly Place,” belongs to the later phase of the Federal style, spanning the late-18th to early-19th century in the newly independent former American colonies.

Augusta Payne Briggs Rathbone, painter and printmaker, was born in Berkeley, California on 30 November 1897. In 1900, her parents, Henry and Julia Briggs Rathbone, were living in the San Francisco home of her grandparents, Obil and Mary Briggs, and that same year her mother passed away. After the 1906 earthquake and conflagration, Rathbone was sent to live in Berkeley with her aunt, Edith Moses. Rathbone eventually returned to San Francisco where she attended Miss Hamlin’s School for Girls and Young Ladies. She received her BA degree from the University of California Berkeley in 1920 and the following year she sailed to Paris where she continued her studies at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. She also studied with Lucien Simon and for several years with the Spanish artist Claudio Castelucho y Diana.

Rathbone returned to France for extended periods over the next eighteen years and her studio was located at the University Women’s Club now known as Reid Hall. Painting and sketching were her main interests until her introduction to printmaking in 1927 by the artist Nora Hamilton of Chicago. Rathbone began to concentrate on printmaking and took her plates to Monsieur Alfred Porcabeuf in Paris for printing. Her earliest intaglios featured the Sierra Nevada and urban scenes of New York and San Francisco. In the late 1930s, Rathbone created etching and aquatints of the villages in Brittany and the French Riviera. After World War II, she returned to Paris but in the face of prohibitive printing costs she purchased a small press and taught herself how to print her plates.

Rathbone exhibited at the Salon de Nationale, Paris, in the spring of 1930, 1931, and 1933 and in the autumn salons of 1930 and 1937. Her work was included in the exhibition American Color Prints at the Brooklyn Museum in 1933, and a solo exhibition of her work was mounted at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1940. Her work and that of Elizabeth Ginno were featured at the California State Library in Sacramento in 1952 and again, in 1954, at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

Augusta Payne Briggs Rathbone died on 19 March 1990 in Palo Alto, California.