When eighteen-year-old Ruby Schmidt defies her parents and her childhood beau and leaves Texas so she can attend the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, she has no idea what she’s getting into. From the moment she disembarks from the train at Broad Street Station, the noise and crowds of people overwhelm her. She’d never seen so many people in her entire life.
Once she sees the Academy (PAFA), she’s hooked. “Red and black brickwork patterns graced the magnificent façade of the Academy. Terra cotta statuary, floral designs, and stone tracery surround a large Gothic window. Above, a bas-relief frieze depicts famous artists. She’s never seen such elaborate ornamentation on a building. She enters through a two-story arch, gaping in awe at the decorative tiled floors, a spectacular staircase with banisters of bronze and mahogany, walls studded with golden rosettes, and a blue ceiling spangled with silver stars. How easy to learn art here where beauty dwelled.
Ruby and Willow and a couple of male artists rent a studio above a photographer’s studio on Chestnut Street. As her education progresses, Ruby studies classical Greek art and architecture. She and her best friend, Willow, carry their watercolor boxes to the Philadelphia Waterworks with its Doric columns, pavilions, and elaborate balustrades to sketch the flowing water at dawn when golden mists transformed the buildings into ghostly temples to pagan gods and again at sunset when sculls scuttle like black long-legged water bugs across orange water, their wakes forming lavender ripples endlessly intersecting, splitting the reflections of clouds into mosaics, before dying out in the dark boulders at the shore.
In Fairmount Park, along the shores of the Schuykill River the women discover a half dozen naked young men playing unselfconsciously. Their laughter rumbles up the embankment to the two women. Sunlight gilds male bodies. As they wrestle and fling one another into the water, their muscles flex and contract and their pale skin contrasts with burnt umber rocks. They emerge, river gods rising from the primordium, fluid sluicing over white arms and whiter legs, dripping off their curls, the tips of their noses, their fingers, and other protrusions. Ruby sighs. “We should be allowed to paint men like that, Willie. After all, they paint us au naturel.” This scene is inspired by Thomas Eakins’ painting “The Swimming Hole.”
Ruby eventually returns to Texas, realizing she’s just not cut out for big city life, that she needs the solitude of the plains to feed her creativity.
