Hannah Elliott
Hannah Elliott (born September 29, 1876 in Atlanta, Georgia; died October 6, 1956 in Birmingham) was an artist and art educator.
Elliott was trained by private art teachers in Vicksburg, Mississippi; Kansas City, Missouri; and Memphis, Tennessee. In Birmingham she trained with Roderick MacKenzie. She also studied at the Académie Colarossi in Paris, France.
When she was 19, Elliott founded the Nineteenth Century Club as a young women's group for the discussion of literary topics. On her 28th birthday in 1904 her mother told her that she could no longer be expected to marry, making that the happiest day of her life.
Early in her career, Elliott specialized in producing portrait miniatures, and developed a national reputation by the turn of the 20th century. Her works, often executed with watercolors on ivory medallions, were exhibited them at the Pennsylvania Society of Miniature Painters, and at the 1933 Century of Progress International Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. When Giuseppe Moretti died in 1935 he bequeathed his sculpting tools to her.
In the early 1930s, she turned to landscape painting and adopted a "uniform" featuring a black dress with hat and neck ribbon worn with tennis shoes. She taught countless students at her studio on 13th Avenue South, as well as at the Margaret Allen School and other private schools. She also hosted regular Saturday salons for discussion. Among her students were Eleanor Bridges and Gage Bush Englund. She was known to have taken groups of students on European tours. One alumnus, attorney Henry Upson Sims, was so impressed by his Italian tour led by Elliott that he commissioned the Italianate-style Florentine Building in downtown Birmingham in 1927 in her honor.
Elliott died in 1956 and is buried at Elmwood Cemetery.
References
- White, Marjorie Longenecker, conversation with James Rodger Alexander (September 27, 1986) cited in Alexander's exhibit catalogue Terra Cotta Facades of Birmingham Architecture (1986) Birmingham: UAB Visual Arts Gallery
- Ingham, Vickie Leigh (2004) Art of the New South: Women Artists of Birmingham 1890-1950. Birmingham Historical Society ISBN 9780943994291