We lived in a big, beautiful house in cold Chicago and my mother sometimes told me, “Ruth, you’re fortunate your father makes a very respectable living and someday you’ll be a lady.”

I’d merely nod, grimly I suppose. I already felt I was becoming a lady, albeit a different sort than the society matrons my parents wanted me to emulate.

Shortly before I graduated from high school, Mother and Father summoned me to the large dining room table, and my father proudly announced, “Ruth, I’ve arranged for you to attend Vassar, one of the country’s finest colleges for sophisticated young ladies.”

I looked at his smiling face but didn’t reply.

“Ruth, aren’t you going to thank your father?” my mother asked.

“I’m not going to Vassar. I want to be a painter.”

They looked apoplectically at each other and then at me, and Father said, “That’s out of the question, Ruth. Painting is a hobby, not a pursuit for a serious young lady.”

“Your father’s quite correct about that,” said my mother.

I pushed a hand on each side of my face and yelled, “Go to Vassar if you want, but I never will,” and ran upstairs into my bedroom and locked the door.

In seconds my father followed and began knocking hard on the tall door and my mother said, “Young lady, open this door right now.”

“No, go away.”

“Open up or I’ll break the damn door down,” my father shouted.

“I said, ‘Go away.’”

He began pounding the door with his hands and battering it with a shoulder though I suppose it could have been his head.

“Open this door before your father injuries himself.”

I said nothing and soon heard my mother shout to the housekeeper, “Esther, hurry, bring the key to Ruth’s bedroom.”

I considered barricading the door but instead lay face down on my bed and cried. When they entered the room, I clawed my pillow and kicked the mattress as if I were a crazed swimmer.

“Settle down, Ruth, or I’m calling the doctor,” my mother warned.

I cried louder and shouted, “Get out…”

“You’ll not order me around the house I’ve worked so hard to provide,” said my father.

I stuck my face in the pillow and sobbed, and for two days left all plates of food uneaten in the hall and refused to leave the room.

Without knocking Mother entered my bedroom and said, “All right, Ruth. Rather than committing you to an insane asylum, your father and I have decided to let you take some correspondence classes in art. If you show some talent, we may provide additional help.”

Right away I proved what I already knew: I could paint faces and bodies and flowers and anything else I wanted.

“These are wonderful, Ruth. Your father and I are quite proud.”

“We certainly are,” he said, “and we’re prepared to send you to the very fine Stickney Memorial Art School in Pasadena.”

I enveloped my parents and kissed each on the cheek. In art school far from home I learned fast from fine teachers who were also painters and continued my studies in New York and progressed so well I wrote my parents, “It’s time for me to work and study in Paris.”

“By work, do you mean you already have a job?” my father replied.

“I’ll soon be earning money as a painter and a teacher.”

“In that case, you have our blessing and, for the time being, our financial support,” they responded in a letter both signed.

Paris in the twenties was grand, and I loved the sophisticated people and culture and especially the dashing Italian artist who became my first love and convinced me to move to his hometown in Florence where we worked in the same studio, a small converted bedroom in our two-room apartment. Naturally, I shared these wonderful developments in a letter to my parents.

They immediately responded with this telegram: “When will you be marrying this gentleman?”

I telegraphed back and explained, “We are artists and not concerned about traditional domestic life.”

Another parental telegram followed. “Hope you are selling your art and teaching as well.”

I sent another telegram: “Financial breakthroughs are imminent.”

Their prompt transatlantic response read: “In meantime best you marry your fiancé and perhaps live with his parents.”

I showed the message to Alberto who seemed to read it a few times before he looked up and in his lovely Italian-accented French said, “As you know, darling, I haven’t seen my father since I was a child and my mother’s quite poor. You’ve visited her tiny cottage. She can barely fit inside.”

“Yes, I know, Alberto. That’s why we should marry as soon as possible and look for teaching jobs. We can paint after work.”

“Well, yes, but perhaps I should write your parents and explain we could never live such a regimented life.”

“I could and so could you.”

Looking at me through sensuous brown eyes, he said, “I doubt you could, darling, and I know I couldn’t.”

“Are you saying you don’t want to marry me?”

“Let me consider matters for a few days. My mind is always clearest in Rome.”

He embraced and kissed me and packed his only bag and left and never returned.

“I can’t marry a man mired in Europe,” I wrote my parents. “I have several strong references from my former art teachers in Pasadena and with their help I have an excellent chance to gain a teaching position at the prestigious Pasadena Art Institute.”

That’s what happened. I also found a dependable husband, albeit not a Latin charmer, and began to analyze the world before painting it. At age twenty-eight, as the 1932 Olympics prepared to open in Los Angeles, I completed The Struggle, my entry in the painting competition, and astute viewers said, “Ruth, that’s a marvelous work. But will the judges permit you to show a muscular black wrestler push his white opponent’s face into the canvas while also wrenching the poor man’s arm behind his back?”

I heard only a few grumbles as I won the silver medal in this prestigious exhibition. Four years later an art aficionado and sports fan, celebrating Jesse Owens’ four gold medals in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, commented, “Tell me, Ruth, did you foresee Owens walloping Hitler and his Aryans?”

“Not precisely,” I replied, “but I can see and sense who the best athletes are, as I did in 1932. And the metaphorical possibilities of a black man using strength and skill to overcome ‘white superiority’ were quite stimulating.”

Above all I strove for empathy, and in 1934, in the throes of the Great Depression, I painted Working Stiff, a handsome, brown-haired young man who’s exhausted after hours of menial labor and near collapse as he sits slumping on stairs. His head is down and his eyes closed and his big strong hands are empty save for a cap.

That fellow is much worse off than The Housewife I painted the following year. She’s pretty but somber as she washes a sink full of dishes. At least that indicates she and her husband and daughter just enjoyed a good meal. Viewers shouldn’t consider the lady sad and lonely despite her husband sitting with his back toward her in the dining room. One senses he has hope, dressed in a suit and studying the newspaper. And they have a cute and healthy little girl playing in the kitchen behind her mother.

In a contemporaneous effort, I do bear a stern expression in Portrait of Myself. That, however, isn’t something I attribute to the burdens of society since, while attired in a lovely blue dress enhanced by a white collar, I have the leisure to paint in a studio in our ample upper middle-class home. Any hint of depression could be attributed to inherent factors affecting me and several others in our extended family.

In December 1941, shortly after Pearl Harbor, I issue an existential statement in Death of a Christmas Tree, turning the decorated tree on its head and lifting its wooden base into darkening sky where it’s a fusion of a cross and, by allusion, a swastika. A newspaper in front declares “This Is War” while behind that a garbage can overflows with trash.

Several years after the war ended, I, Ruth Miller Kempster, look disapprovingly at you, and doubtless at myself, in my “Self-Portrait (unfinished).” I don’t know who added that last word. The work is finished or I would’ve added more as I still had a quarter century to live and paint. Nonetheless, the administrators of art never granted me another independent show after 1953 but at least I appeared in group exhibitions and, along with other ladies, seem to be getting more artistic attention now than then.

The Housewife by Ruth Miller Kempster, 1935

Notes: “I Shall Paint” will appear in my second collection about painters projected to be published in the summer of 2026.

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