Portrait of a St. Croix Woman

Moy Glidden and Jane Piper met in 1935 in Daniel Garber’s cast-drawing class at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. During this period they traveled together to St. Croix, where each painted a portrait of the same sitter. In a 1999 letter, Glidden recalled: “Jane [Piper] and I had made friends [with the sitter] as she sat in the 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.”  

Glidden was born in Philadelphia and attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in the 1930s. She studied with Daniel Garber of the Pennsylvania Impressionist school and with Arthur B. Carles, whose teachings shaped her interest in color and abstraction. By the 1950s, Glidden had embraced abstract expressionism, combining vivid color with organic forms drawn from nature, such as trees and flowers. She continued to exhibit her work into the 1980s. 

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