Isabel Bishop’s Working Women: Defying Convention

American artist Isabel Bishop (1902-1988) specialized in portrayals of everyday people, especially those who strolled through, loitered around, or lunched near her studio in New York City’s Union Square. Her sensitive depictions included drawings, prints, and paintings of “new women,” often working women of the era. Working Women will feature never-before-displayed works from the collections of Bishop’s two granddaughters, Sarah and Naomi Wolff, and will include the D’Amour Museum of Fine Art’s own masterpiece, At the Noon Hour.

Vibrant images of working women interacting amid the benches, lunch counters and subways of Union Square, New York City created by American artist Isabel Bishop, demonstrate the strength of the female spirit as they infiltrated the city landscape in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. These “new women” reached beyond the boundaries of the previous decades to carve out new roles in the work force as aspiring clerics, stenographers, bank tellers and office workers, determined to meet the financial challenges of the Great Depression. Bishop became enraptured with them as she witnessed them on lunch breaks and made a career capturing their gestures, gazes, intimate conversations, jaunts on the subway and graceful retreats from the lunch counter stools.  The artist frequently positioned herself on a park bench outside her studio, sketchbook in hand, to chronicle the young inhabitants of Union Square as they enjoyed an ice cream cone, shared the day’s news, took a cool drink from the water fountain or grasped the overhead strap of a subway car. The reserved, demure behavior they maintained inside the offices of insurance companies, small businesses, banks and utility companies could be shed, if only for the lunch hour. In these moments, Bishop found a compelling richness that occupied her hours in the studio.