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BROMWELL ELEMENTARY SCHOOL (214) Telephone: Mr. Jonathan Wolfer, Principal |
Miss Nettie's GalleryHenrietta Bromwell's career as an important regional artist spanned fifty years, from 1885 to 1930. In 1893, she and Anne Evans, daughter of Colorado's second territorial governor John Evans, helped organize the Artists' Club of Denver, which would later become the Denver Art Museum. She contributed sketches and illustrations to local magazines and newspapers, and in the later 1890's she exhibited in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia.
The paintings and sketches that are shown here were published in the Spring 1997 issue of
Colorado Heritage,
the quarterly magazine of the Colorado Historical Society. We are
grateful to Maria Mathews (author of The Art of "Nettie" Bromwell in that issue) and David N.
Wetzel, Publications Director of the Colorado Historical Society, for allowing us to
reproduce these images.
 The untitled painting above shows the cottage Nettie Bromwell shared with her widower father, Henry Pelham Holmes Bromwell. It was located at 1117 Eighth Street in Denver, now the site of the Auraria campus.
 These Sketches In and Around Denver were published in The Coloradan on December 15th, 1892. This cultural magazine promoted the arts as Denver approached the turn of the century, and employed Nettie as an art director and a travel correspondent. Clockwise from upper left: looking down Cherry Creek towards Longs Peak; "The Bottoms" along the South Platte through Denver; "The Crusher" crushing mill; "Near the mill;" Jerome Park (present location southwest of Federal Boulevard and West Colfax Avenue); another perspective of The Bottoms; and a view looking across the Platte into Denver "from the west."
Nettie carried her easel and paints eleven blocks from her home to the corner of West
Eleventh Avenue and Cherry Creek to paint this cottage in 1899. Like many of her
paintings, the work (below) is untitled.
This thin vertical oil shown above, only nine and one-half inches wide, is untitled but is
now known as
Rocky Mountain High, circa 1900.
It is believed to have been painted
during one of Nettie's frequent artistic forays from Manitou Springs up Pikes Peak trail.
A Shady Lane (above) is thought to show the rural Harman neighborhood (East Second to East Sixth avenues, from York Street to Colorado Boulevard). This neighborhood, of course, is the location today of our own Bromwell Elementary School, named after Nettie's father.
The painting above is now called
Red Mountain (circa 1890)
but actually shows
something more like a bluff. It is another view that most likely came from the area near
Manitou Springs.
Below: A Bit in Denver Bottoms, from 1900.
Manitou Springs did not have an exclusive
hold on Nettie's interests. As The Rocky Mountain News reported, "Miss Bromwell
sticks faithfully to her old hunting ground, West Denver, Arlington, and the Cherry Creek
Bottoms." The old Arlington neighborhood is now a part of the Auraria campus.
Somebody -- perhaps Nettie herself -- backmarked the painting "$15," but it is unknown
whether she was successful in selling it at the price. Today this painting is one of the
images that makes up the mural on the front of the Colorado Historical Museum.
Above: Nettie's peaceful Church in the Moonlight from 1900 was very probably St. Elizabeth's Catholic Church near her home. The building still stands today as a centerpiece of the Auraria campus.
Trees with Distant Mountains,
below, was painted on May 8th, 10th, and 12th, 1890.
Bromwell Biographer Maria Matthews believes this may show the scrub-brushed plains
east of Denver.
Nettie called the building above
Old Smith Mill,
adding a note on the back of the
painting that read, "West Denver, cor. of 8th and Garrison Sts." It is dated 1894.
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