"Amazingly Clever and Excellent:" Nella Fontaine Binckley in Washington, D.C.

Pictorial Review front cover, January 1927

[[Lelia Mechlin], "Notes of Arts and Artists," The Sunday Star (Washington, D. C.), undated clipping, circa 1920s, enclosed with letter from Nella Fontaine Binckley at Washington, D.C., to Robert Morton Hughes at Norfolk, Virginia, August 20, 1927, Box 1, Folder 8: Nellie Brinkley [i.e. Nella Fontaine Binckley], 1927-1937, Robert Morton Hughes Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, Patricia W. and J. Douglas Perry Library, Old Dominion University Libraries, Norfolk, VA 23529. Link to letter here.] 

The exhibition of paintings and sculptors by members which opened at the Arts Club, 2017 I Street, on March 15, to continue until April 5, is an admirable and uncommonly interesting show, comprising no less than ninety exhibits . . . 

There is a group of amazingly clever and excellent poster portraits by Miss Nellie Fontaine Binckley, admirable likenesses, all very successful as characterizations. One is of the sculptor George Julian Zelnay, representing him at work; another is Mrs. Zelnay in costume; a third shows Lieut. Andre L'Huiller, the young French army officer who is lecturing in this country in the interest of reconstruction of French villages; a fourth is of Miss Amelia Dorothy Defries, whose recent gift of British posters to the Library of Congress has already been noticed; the fifth is of Mr. Siebers, the artist.

[Leila Mechlin (1874-1949)
Arts Club of Washington, D.C. (1915-present): "first club in the city to admit women as charter members." Official website here.
Ellen/Nellie/Nella Fontaine Binckley (September 1, 1860- April 27, 1951; she was not born in 1877 as she successfully hoaxed some time after returning from the West Coast to the East Coast in the early 1900s)
Robert Morton Hughes, Sr. (1855-1940)
George Julian Zolnay (1863-1949). See his papers in the Smithsonian American Archives of Art, link here.
Mrs. Zolnay = Abbie R. Gillim Zolnay (1880-1968)
Miss Amelia Dorothy Defries (b. circa 1883)
Edward Selmar Siebert (1857-1944)]

Many thanks to William Myers, Mary Davy and Sally Young for their ongoing research collaboration; in this case, specifically to William for providing a scan of the original clipping, and in turn thanks to Mr. Mel Frizzell, Special Collections Specialist.