Blanche Ames Ames (February 18, 1878 – March 2, 1969) was an American artist, political activist, inventor, writer, and prominent supporter of women's suffrage and birth control.
Personal life
Born Blanche Ames in Lowell, Massachusetts, Ames was the daughter of Adelbert Ames, a West Point graduate who became a Civil War General and Mississippi Governor, and Blanche Butler Ames, who attended the Academy of the Visitation and enjoyed painting and the arts. The fourth of six children, she was the sister of Adelbert Ames Jr., a prominent scientist. She was also granddaughter to Civil War General and Massachusetts Governor Benjamin Butler and actress Sarah Hildreth Butler.
Ames attended the Rogers Hall School in Lowell. She was later one of few women of her time to attend college, earning a B.A. in Art History and a diploma in Studio Art from Smith College in 1899. She was the president of her graduating class.
In 1900, she married Harvard University botany professor Oakes Ames (no relation). She took the married name Blanche Ames Ames. Ames illustrated her husband's botanical research on orchids. The Ameses had four children: Pauline (born 1901), Oliver (born 1903), Amyas (born 1906), and Evelyn (born 1910). Ames managed her professional work and family by having a studio at home and hiring domestic servants to assist her with domestic work.
Ames' daughter, Pauline, grew up to write many books about her family, including "Oakes Ames, Jottings of a Harvard Botanist" (1979), and "The Plimpton Papers, Law and Diplomacy" (1985). One of Ames' grandchildren was George Ames Plimpton, famed sportswriter.
Ames is buried in the Hildreth Family Cemetery in Lowell.
The Ames estate, which includes Blanche Ames' art studio, in North Easton, Massachusetts is called Borderland. The estate was designed by Ames herself in the early 1900s. It is now open to the public as Borderland State Park.
Artist
Ames was a talented artist in a variety of media. Her work included portraiture, primarily done in oil paint, botanical illustration, and political cartoons. She had a studio in her home in North Easton, Massachusetts.
Though introduced to art through her mother Blanche Ames's lifelong interest in painting, Blanche Ames Ames first became seriously interested in practicing art as a college student. Praised by her professors and classmates, she began to envision her life as an artist. Through her persistence, and with the encouragement her husband Oakes (who gifted her with an extravagant set of books on famous artists while courting her) this vision became reality.
Beyond the knowledge of art history she gained at Smith, Ames was well aware of artists of her own time. In Boston, she sat for a portrait by prominent American Impressionist Edmund C. Tarbell in 1906. She attended the armory show of modern art in New York City in 1913. Though not a part of the circle of women producing suffrage cartoons in New York, who were connected through Heterodoxy and other organizations, she kept close watch on their work and other efforts toward suffrage in both England and America, hiring a newspaper clipping service to save suffrage news from 1915 to 1916.
In 1902, she began illustrating Oakes Ames's botanical publications, including his seven volume treatise on orchids, which is still considered one of the best researched to this day. Previously he had illustrated the orchids himself with watercolor. Blanche Ames Ames first used watercolors for the orchid illustrations, but later switched to copperplate etching. She also published detailed pen and ink drawings of the orchids. The illustrations were drawn from dried plant specimens observed through a camera lucida. Blanche Ames Ames continued to illustrate orchids throughout their life together, eventually designing the decorations which now appear at both of their graves.
During the 1910s Blanche Ames Ames produced a number of political cartoons promoting women's suffrage, which appeared in publications including Woman's Journal, and the Boston American. In 1915 she became the art editor of Woman's Journal (along with Fredrikke Palmer and Mayme B. Harwood). Three years before in 1912, the Woman's Journal's offices had relocated its headquarters from New York to nearby Boston. Ames' work called, "Cradle of Liberty", was selected to be the state's suffrage poster. Political cartoons like Ames' were essential to winning women's voting rights.
Ames's etchings are on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and her oil painting can be seen at Harvard, Dartmouth, and Columbia University.