Leila

Born in Watertown, Connecticut, Alice Stoddard was a landscape, portrait, and marine painter who spent most of her career in Philadelphia and on Monhegan Island, Maine.  She studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with Thomas Eakins, Thomas Anshutz, and William Merritt Chase. 

She painted portraits of numerous luminaries including Federal and Supreme Court justices.  She was a frequent exhibitor at the National Academy of Design, to which she was elected an Associate Member in 1938.

This delightful painting, which captures the spontaneous, freckled smile of a young red-headed girl holding a straw hat with pink ribbon, won the Fellowship Prize at the Annual Exhibition of The Pennsylvania Academy in Philadelphia in 1916.  That same year, it was donated to the Reading Public Museum by philanthropist George D. Horst.