Grace Turnbull
Grace Hill Turnbull was an American painter, sculptor and writer.
Born to a cultured family in Baltimore, Turnbull studied painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Art Students League of New York. She then turned her attention to sculpture, studying at the Rinehart School of the Maryland Institute and in Rome. In 1914 she received the Whitelaw Reid Prize in Paris, and she received the Anna Hyatt Huntington Prize in 1932 and 1944. Turnbull was notorious during her life for her commitment to abstinence in many fields – she objected strenuously to alcohol, and served only apple juice at her own gatherings – and her support for civil rights. She lived in Baltimore for much of her life, in a house and studio designed by her brother Bayard, and never married. Besides her artistic pursuits she wrote a number of books, including Tongues of Fire, Essence of Plotinus, Fruit of the Vine, and the autobiography Chips from My Chisel ; she also wrote pamphlets and contributed articles to a variety of publications.
Turnbull's 1941 sculpture Python of India is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while two of her public artworks, a memorial to Lizette Woodworth Reese and a statue of a naiad, remain in Baltimore. A collection of her papers is held at Syracuse University. Her house in the Guilford neighborhood, which she had willed along with a collection of artworks to the Maryland Historical Society, still stands. Her work was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1996.
