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“Untitled (Self-Portrait)” by Peggy “Pegasus” Martin Nichols (American) - Oil on board / c. 1910–1925 - Wichita Art Museum (Kansas) #WomenInArt #PeggyMartinNichols #PegasusMartin #WichitaArtMuseum #selfportrait #WAM #BlueskyArt #artText #art #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #AmericanArtist
Created sometime between 1910 and 1925, this early- to mid-career self-portrait shows Peggy “Pegasus” Martin Nichols testing how color and posture can convey psychological presence. A radical close-up, stripped of clothing details or setting, focuses all attention on her steady, searching gaze and on the labor of painting itself, visible in every dragged and broken stroke. This small, vertically oriented painting presents a tightly cropped view of a light-skinned woman from just below the collarbone to the top of her head. She faces slightly left but looks straight toward us with wide hazel-green eyes under softly arched, dark brows. Her short brown hair is brushed back from her forehead, breaking into loose, choppy strands around her temples and ears. Coral-pink lips rest gently closed, framed by a subtle flush of color in her cheeks and chin. Thick, textured strokes of peach, rose, lavender, blue, and yellow model the planes of her face and long neck, leaving small areas of bare or scraped board that hint at quick, confident reworking. The neck tilts subtly and carries lavender and beige shadows that merge into the roughly indicated shoulders. Behind her, stacked strokes of deep blue, teal, green, and black form an abstract, flickering backdrop that pushes her luminous face forward. Nichols sometimes worked under the gender-neutral signature “Pegasus,” a strategy that may have helped her navigate an art world that often sidelined women painters. The Wichita Art Museum now holds several of her works, including intimate family portraits and socially charged scenes, allowing this self portrait to be sit alongside paintings such as “Abundance” and “A Negro Man”as part of a broader practice attentive to everyday lives in the Midwestern United States. Seen in that context, the artist studying her own face here also models the empathetic scrutiny she would later extend to others, helping renew attention to a once-obscured woman artist in American regional art history.
December 1, 2025 at 1:16 AM