American Eve by Paula Uruburu

breadwinner might put an end to their days of eating shredded wheat.
    Another woman whom the new model and her mother befriended in Philadelphia was the sister of a well-known and respected artist, John Storm. Florence Evelyn, already a “looker” and a “peach” (words she had heard from several boarders) needed neither the latest fashions nor makeup to enhance her natural gifts. After hearing of the girl’s first sitting, at his sister’s suggestion, Storm asked Mrs. Nesbit for permission to paint her daughter’s portrait. Starting the very next week, and every Sunday after that, Florence Evelyn went to the elderly Storm’s house and posed for him.
    On Saturdays, when she wasn’t working at the department store, and nearly every Sunday, she would sit for several hours in a studio, her head cocked to one side while the light was good, pretending to savor the fragrance of a fake flower or peering longingly out a window facing a brick wall across the alleyway. Sometimes as she sat having her thick hair braided then unbraided for the fifth time by her mother (to enhance the waves), Florence Evelyn looked up at the skylight, through which the sounds of the street filtered, along with the late-afternoon sunlight. Spending all her days either in the hectic store or in a musty, somber studio, if she wished that she could be outside, meeting people her own age and being carefree, she kept it to herself.
    On most days, Mamma Nesbit seemed to have lost any hesitancy about the suitability of her daughter’s posing for artists, be they men or women. The way Evelyn rationalized it in later years, “when I saw that I could earn more money posing as an artist’s model than I could at Wanamaker’s, I gave my mother no peace until she permitted me to pose for a livelihood.” She adds, tellingly, “her objections crumbled under the force of necessity.” To her delight, Florence Evelyn was eventually able to shed her ill-fitting apron for good—and for the more enticing attire (or lack thereof) of the professional studio model. Once posing demanded all of her time, the fourteen-year-old Florence Evelyn was ecstatic to be able to trade two jobs for one, thinking that now she might at least earn some freedom along with her wages.
    It was through Storm that the eager little model was soon introduced to an emergent artists’ colony, comprised solely of women, who shared a busy studio in the city not far from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where all had been students. The group of three included Violet Oakley, a painter and stained-glass artist who had studied under Louis Comfort Tiffany, and two aspiring and talented painter-illustrators, Jessie Willcox Smith and Elizabeth Shippen Green, each of whom was on the cusp of her own fame and independent career.
    Oakley was instantly struck by an ethereal quality in the young girl’s looks and demeanor. The latter two, who specialized in depicting children, saw in Florence Evelyn’s smooth adolescent features, which still retained some of the roundness of childhood in spite of her poor diet, the perfect model for idealized children’s heads. With an important commission for some stained-glass windows to be installed in a nearby church, Oakley engaged Florence Evelyn’s services as a model immediately after meeting with her. In the girl’s graceful, undeveloped figure, boyish in its thin, lean lines, she saw the perfect embodiment of a kind of ambivalent, classically androgynous spirituality wrestling with the sensuality of her face. Inspired by the girl’s subtle Raphael-like beauty, Oakley used her almost exclusively as a model for her angels. Barefoot, draped in floor-length diaphanous white robes, with her waist-length profusion of dark hair uncoiled down the small of her back or pinned up in a loose chignon, Florence Evelyn was immortalized in a number of stained-glass images. As she recalled years later, “I believe I posed for a heavenly host of angels; there are a