Helena de Kay Gilder Reading

Anne Goddard Morse was born in Providence, Rhode Island, to Caroline Emily Pearce and architect Alpheus C. Morse. She is believed to have trained first in Boston, then at New York’s Cooper Union School of Design for Women as well as the Art Students League; she may have befriended Helena de Kay (later Gilder) at either school. Like many women of her day, Morse specialized in works on paper and decorative design. In 1880,she won fourth prize in the popular contest for lithographer Louis Prang’s Christmas Card competition with an Aesthetic movement design that evoked the English illustration work of Kate Greenaway, wedded with a stanza from Christina Rossetti’s famous poem, A Christmas Carol. Morse's design was so well received that it was also reproduced in the form of a "very handsome and unique mantlepiece representing four kneeling children with doves" by the Boston Terra Cotta Company.

This intimate watercolor sketch of Helena de Kay Gilder suggests a close friendship between artist and sitter, as the informal representation was signed and gifted, then preserved by the family. It relates to another delicate watercolor on ivory miniature of the sitter by Morse from around the same time. It would complement additional portraits by de Kay Gilder in The Met’s collection—namely, by Cecilia Beaux and Augustus Saint-Gaudens—while suggesting the subject’s network of artist-friends. The watercolor would be the first work by Morse to enter the Museum, documenting the life of an all-but-forgotten woman artist and broadening the American Wing’s paper holdings.