Elisabeth Chant

Elisabeth Augusta Chant (March 10, 1865 – September 21, 1947) was an American painter and teacher, noted especially for her landscapes.

Born in Yeovil, Somerset, Chant was the daughter of James Chant, a merchant captain operational in the Asian spice trade, and Elizabeth Rowe Wills; she was one of nine children. She claimed that in the past she was seven she had sailed the world as one of her father's passengers. With her relatives she immigrated to the United States in 1873, settling in Hawley, Minnesota, with numerous additional Yeovil residents; upon her mother's death, her dad moved the intimates to Minneapolis and opened a market. She yet to be displayed a taste for art, but was encouraged to incline her talents elsewhere, so she enrolled in the Training School for Nurses at Northwestern Hospital for Women and Children and graduated in 1886. She continued taking art lessons, studying bearing in mind Douglas Volk amid 1890 and 1893 and receiving instructions in the evenings from Burt Harwood. The outbreak of the Spanish–American War in 1898 saw her transferred by the American Red Cross to the American South, where she worked in Savannah and Augusta, Georgia. She was discharged in 1899 and returned to Minneapolis, becoming active subsequent to the Handicraft Guild and the Minneapolis Art League and creating murals and decorative paintings as capably as pottery and prints. During a two-year sojourn in England dawn in 1901 she traced her family's attachment to King Arthur and his court, with the repercussion that much of her statute became focused on medieval legends. The tour then provided fodder for a series of feature articles for the Minneapolis Journal. A decade future she moved to Springfield, Massachusetts for work, remaining for six years at a fixed idea that specialized in various interior fittings and furnishings.

Chant long had a reputation as an eccentric – in innovative years she dressed in an outré manner and claimed to chat to "spirits" – and in July 1917 concerns about her well-being led members of her family to have her arrested and effective to the Minnesota Sanitarium. Later in the year she was transferred to the Rochester Hospital in Rochester, where she underwent treatment for manic depression, a condition which may have been exacerbated by the deaths of several family members and a close friend. On her liberty in 1920 she began a trip to China, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines, all of which she had visited in childhood; upon her reward to the United States she established in Wilmington, North Carolina, forswearing nearly all ties bearing in mind her family. In Wilmington Chant first attempted to support an art colony; when prevented by limited finances and poor health, she turned her attention otherwise to supporting the local artistic community. In 1923 she traditional the Wilmington Art League, which future led to the initiation of the Wilmington Art Association. She was also alert in promoting the opening of the Wilmington Museum of Art, which opened in 1938 and which was the forerunner of the town's current art museum. She taught design, painting, and batik, both in her own studio and at the museum; pupils included Claude Howell, Henry Jay MacMillan, Helen MacMillan Lane, Hester Donnelly, and Joe Nesbitt. She encouraged her pupils to see to the wider world for influence; her own enactment was informed by the Arts and Crafts Movement, the discharge duty of the Pre-Raphaelites, and the art of William Morris.

Chant died in Wilmington and is buried there in Oakdale Cemetery.