"Village in Winter" 25 x 30 inch oil on canvas painting by Fern Isabel Coppedge
Fern Isabel Coppedge (July 28, 1883 – April 21, 1951)[1] was an American impressionist painter.
Life
Born in the small town of Cerro Gordo near Decatur, Illinois, to John L. Kuns and Maria Dilling Kuns, Fern Coppedge spent much of her life in Pennsylvania where she was associated with the New Hope School of American Impressionism, the Fellowship of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Philadelphia Art Alliance, and what became known as the Pennsylvania Impressionism movement.[2][3]
Coppedge became well known for her work as a landscape impressionist, painting snow scenes of the villages and farms of Bucks County.
[5]
The Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, displayed 50 of the artist's paintings in a retrospective exhibition in 1990 titled "Fern Coppedge: A Forgotten Woman" and published a 48-page catalog. In 2020–2021, the museum held another solo exhibition of her work, featuring new acquisitions and celebrating the digitization of her scrapbooks.[6]
Her husband, Robert W. Coppedge, a science teacher and botanist, was born in Missouri in 1878 and died in New Hope, Pennsylvania in 1948. The Coppedges were married in 1904 (not 1910) and remained husband and wife for 44 years.[7]
Works
In 2011 a newly discovered landscape painting by Coppedge, entitled October, was sold at auction for $29,800. In 2006 a Coppedge painting was auctioned for $308,000.[8]
