Olive Rush

Olive Rush ( * 1875 in Fairmount, Indiana, † 1966 in Santa Fe, New Mexico) was an American painter, illustrator and pioneer of American artists in training.

Life

Olive Rush came from a Quaker family in Indiana. She studied at Earlham College in Richmond, before she worked as an illustrator in New York in 1895. Her portraits of women and children were well known, especially in the magazines Woman's Home Companion and St. Nicholas Magazine. In 1904, Rush moved to Wilmington to study at the prestigious art school Brandywine School of Howard Pyle. In Europe, she studied French and British painters (1911) and completed her art studies at the Private School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Olive Rush's work was strongly influenced by Asian art and by the Spanish painter El Greco. Later she taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe.