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BROMWELL ELEMENTARY SCHOOL (214)
2500 East
Fourth Avenue,
80206-4214
(Columbine Street at East Fourth Avenue)

Telephone:
(303) 388-5969
Fax: (720) 424-9355
E-mail: Bromwell@dpsk12.org

Mr. Jonathan Wolfer, Principal

The Life and Art of Nettie Bromwell

Henrietta Bromwell, among Colorado's earliest landscape artists, was a founder of the Artists' Club of Denver which evolved into today's Denver Art Museum. Over a span of thirty years beginning in 1880, Bromwell's paintboxes and sketchbooks were used to record landscapes in Denver and Colorado. Many of her works survive today, offering the viewer freeze-frame glimpses into a Colorado of an earlier time.

Henrietta Elizabeth Bromwell was born July 13, 1859, in Charleston, Illinois, the first child of Henry Pelham Holmes Bromwell and Elizabeth Payne Bromwell. In 1862 the family was joined by a baby brother also named Henry. Elizabeth Bromwell died in January 1865 and five years later at age eleven Henrietta, her brother, father, and paternal relatives emigrated to Colorado where Henry became a respected jurist and member of Colorado's territorial legislature.

Young Henrietta was educated by private tutors at home, attaining a fine cultural foundation. Brother Henry, meanwhile, studied to become a lawyer and perhaps join in partnership with his father, but died in 1881 at age nineteen. Henrietta later recorded that her father, whom she lived with and cared for during the remainder of his life, "never recovered from the loss and was never the same."

Neither, it appears, did she. Father and daughter became involved in tasks to help fill the void left by young Henry's death. Father was a dedicated member of the Masonic order and commenced work on a lengthy manuscript titled Restorations of Masonic Geometry and Symbolry. Later he worked with the state legislature on behalf of women's suffrage which was enacted in Colorado in 1893. Meantime, Henrietta, or "Nettie" as she was known, prepared for a career as an artist, enrolling in 1885 in the University of Denver, then located at Fourteenth and Arapahoe streets, a few blocks from the Bromwell home at 1117 Eighth Street. The curriculum consisted of charcoal and color work, with indoor and outdoor sketching exercises and the study of composition. It appears that she remained in the program for a year, earning a diploma certificate.

The Bromwell residence was close-by the "Bottoms" of the South Platte River, location of various industrial and wooded sites, which afforded her many opportunities for landscape studies. As her abilities sharpened, Henrietta's reputation as a local artist was becoming established. The Rocky Mountain News noted: "Miss Bromwell sticks faithfully to her old hunting ground, West Denver, Arlington [Auraria], and the Cherry Creek Bottoms." She spent summers near the mountains; the Denver Republican noted in 1897: "Miss Henrietta Bromwell will confine her summer to Manitou where she usually spends the warm months making sketches and studies of the red rocks and cedar trees."

Nettie Bromwell became part of a community of artists gathering in Denver at the time. In 1893 she and Anne Evans, daughter of Colorado's second territorial governor John Evans, helped to organize the Artists' Club of Denver, which would become the Denver Art Museum. Bromwell played an important role in carrying out the organization's functions during its formative years. As club secretary , a position she held unti1 1897, she attended to clerical matters, acted as a jurist, and helped organize catalogues and shows.

Bromwell's art career, although it was interrupted at times, spanned some fifty years, from 1885 to 1930. unfortunately, she neglected to date many of her works and even left some unsigned, making it difficult today to analyze her growth pattern. Bromwell paintings believed to be from 1885-1893 include wooded mountain trails, farm- houses by streams with clothes flapping from clotheslines and sometimes with women and children feeding chickens and doing chores; quiet wooded scenes, and industrial landscapes. Some of these earlier works appear static and shadowless. Later, her color palette lightened, her brush stroke loosened, and shadows of blue and purple appeared in her work.

Bromwell utilized oils, watercolors, and pen and ink, and may have been influenced by European landscape artists who were early proponents of "painting out in the open air." Indeed, a photograph exists of Bromwell painting outdoors in 1893. Inspiration could also have come from American artists such as George Henry Durrie and Jasper Francis Cropsey who focused on farmhouses, barns, haystacks, and farmers with their chores.

In 1897 Bromwell exhibited in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. The next year, she and fellow Artists' Club of Denver member Charles Partridge Adams -- whose works sometime resemble hers -- represented Colorado at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition in Omaha. Bromwell also taught art, with a studio in downtown Denver's Majestic Building, and wrote a brief essay titled "Sketching and Painting from Nature" for the January 1899 publication The Western Club Woman where she notes the importance which the French impressionist Claude Monet had on landscape painting. Her art career seemed to be secure, but personal tragedies were to interrupt her life for years to come.

Women often have interrupted careers to rear families, but perhaps Henrietta Bromwell interrupted her career to keep a family memory and family name alive. On January 3, 1903, Bromwell's father died in the home they shared. During his declining years, she attended to his comfort and the death was a shock from which she never recovered --perhaps to the detriment of her artistic interests. She is last mentioned as entering the Artists' Club of Denver annual exhibits in 1903.

Six months after her father's death, Henrietta helped to form the Henry Bromwell Masonic Publishing Company to publish the Masonic book over which her father had labored for so long. In so doing, she exhibited a considerable business ability, and from 1905 through 1907 she traveled widely in Colorado and elsewhere by train, visiting Masonic lodges and selling subscriptions to her father's book. Her railroading adventures are delightfully chronicled through several sketchbooks and her diary of 1905-07. Her descriptions were often as vivid as her paintings:

I was the only passenger going to Aspen and had the coach to myself before leaving Basalt. I looked long at the green mountains. It would be good to paint from the R.R. station looking across the pool. I never saw a mountain like that before, brilliant green clear to the top, like flush moss only yellower and lighter and it shown in the sunlight, seemingly with a luster. Beyond it was a distant blue mountain and over all a deep blue sky with white clouds, cottages in the middle distance with one tall quaker [aspen], the leaves changing and trembling in the breeze -- now white, now green...

The Masonic book was followed by a volume of poetry her father had written, and next she prepared and published three genealogy-based books. Though unmarried and childless, Henrietta seemed determined to keep the Bromwell name alive, at the expense of her career.

Henrietta Bromwell's diary of 1917 provides insight concerning the personal life of a single woman in World War I Denver. The diary contains little mention of artistic endeavors, and sometimes centers on her weekly sessions working with the Red Cross war effort at Corona School. Bromwell now was residing in a duplex at 646 Williams Street and supporting herself at least partially through rental of family properties. Many of her days seem filled with concerns and fear ("I am worried about so little money to pay taxes"). Her great sorrow at the death of her best friend Emma Briggs, who was run over by an automobile, coupled with entries describing her visits to Riverside Cemetery to place wreaths on the graves of her father and brother, suggest that she was deeply moved at the loss of loved ones. She almost seems to relive her father's last hours when she writes poignantly:

January 9
14 years ago this morning at half past three o'clock my dear father died. Mrs. P. was there and Mr. P. came and went for Doctor E. who did not come until daylight when it was too late and after another Doctor R. had pronounced him dead. I remember the tender way they turned his head over on the pillow. I went (no this was the second night I think) and played a few bars of music as he lay alone in the parlor in his coffin -- then shut the piano never to be reopened for many years.

The diary is not all gloomy, however. She enjoyed seeing Mary Pickford in Remember the Redwoods and The Little American at the Rialto movie house on Curtis Street, she saw plays at the nearby Princess Theater, and spent winter evenings reading Dickens and Scott. She walked a great deal; strolling twenty-three blocks to the capitol building was common -- although she noted that inclement weather prevented her from attending Buffalo Bill Cody's wake in the capitol rotunda on January 14, 1917. Simple joys were fondly recalled: on a spring's morn she made "an early morning excursion into the quiet yard to see the growth of the flowers, pinching off the dead pansies." She bought a small stove for $6.50, got sausage at Corona Market, searched for a Navajo rug, and looked for old brass candlesticks on, West Colfax Avenue. All earned places in the diary.

Whatever affinity Bromwell still retained for the Denver art scene appeared to diminish through 1917. After a private viewing of the twenty-third annual exhibit of the Artists' Club of Denver, she exclaimed: "I shall never go to another of these! These hellish artists! How I wish I had never known any of them!" Two weeks later, however, she accepted an invitation to an artists' get-together in a fancy home at 305 Gilpin Street in the Country Club district. She invited two members of the art club to visit her and see her sketches. She waited in vain for days and they failed to show up.

She never mentioned her paintings or the artists' club again in her diary. The 1917 diary almost pathetically ends with, "This year has been marked by the departure from life of my best friend Emma Briggs. It has been a dull year in other ways. I have seen little and accom-plished so little. ..."

In 1922 at age sixty-three, her artistic activities apparently somewhat revived, Bromwell did twenty-two pencil drawings of Colorado scenes in a tiny green leather-bound book measuring only three and one-half by five and one-half inches. Subsequently, however, she returned to writing and not art, preparing the five-volume Colorado Portrait and Biographical Index, a reference work. Her father's entry therein consumed seven pages; perhaps she wished to ensure again that his name and accomplishments would not be forgotten.

During her final decade, without family and perhaps with only a handful of close friends, Nettie Bromwell donated belongings to the Colorado Historical Society and the Denver Public Library. The Society received ninety-six art works plus personal mementos such as family picture albums and scrapbooks, 232 books, Haviland chinaware, musical instruments, Indian artifacts, clothing, and even a parasol. The library was given a scrapbook, diary, paintings and books, and a voluminous amount of genealogical notes.

Henrietta Bromwell's parents died during Januarys. On January 8, 1946, Henrietta died of a lingering illness, the nature of which was not publicly disclosed, and is buried in Riverside Cemetery, next to her father.

The year 1998 will mark the centennial of the Trans-Mississippi Exposition at which Henrietta Elizabeth Bromwell represented her adopted home of Colorado. Through her diaries, genealogies, reference works, and particularly her paintings and sketchbooks, Colorado's past is preserved both artistically and historically.

* * *

Maria Matthews was previously the acting coordinator for traveling exhibitions at the Colorado Historical Society, and she worked extensively on the Bromwell art collection while an intern at the Society. This article is based upon her master's degree project at the University of Colorado at Denver (1196), "Henrietta Browmell, 1859-1946: Piecing Her Life Together." The article originally appeared as "The Art of 'Nettie' Bromwell" in Colorado Heritage (Spring 1997). Ms. Matthews graciously gave us permission to reproduce her article here, as did David Wetzel, Publications Director of the Colorado Historical Society.

For Further Reading
This article was abridged from Maria Matthews, "Henrietta Bromwell, 1859-1946: Piecing Her Life Together," unpublished master's project (1996), University of Colorado at Denver, a copy in the library of the Colorado Historical Society, Denver. The article draws upon Henrietta Bromwell's The Bromwell Genealogy: Descendants of William Bromwell and Beulah Hall (Denver: self published, 1910); John William Leonard (ed.), Woman's Who's Who of America 1914-1915 (New York: The American Commonwealth Company, 1914); Henrietta Bromwell's diary of 1917 and her "Art Scene Scrapbook," both in the Henrietta E. Bromwell Collection, Colorado Historical Society, Denver; the Catalogue of Annual Exhibition of the Artists' Club 1894, copy in the Western History Department of the Denver Public Library; the Official Catalogue of Fine Arts, 1898 Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition, (Omaha: Klopp and Bartlett Company, 1898), copy in the Joslyn Museum of Art library, Omaha; Georgianna Contiguglia, "Bromwell Paintings are Worthy of Conservation," Colorado Heritage News, Colorado Historical Society, December 1986; Stanley L. Cuba, "Colorado Woman Artists 1859-1950," foreword to exhibit catalogue, January 19,1989; and Chris Petteys, "Colorado's First Women Artists," Empire Magazine of The Denver Post, May 6,1979. Researchers also may wish to consult two articles by Henrietta Bromwell: "Sketching and Painting from Nature" (Denver: The Western Club Woman January 1899) and "Up Pike's Peak Trail" (Denver: The Western Club Woman January 1890).

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