Lucille Douglass

Lucille Sinclair Douglass was born on November 4, 1878, in Tuskegee, Alabama, to Civil War veteran Walton Eugene Douglass and Mary Sinclair (Mollie) Douglass. The family's situation has been described as "genteel poverty" characteristic of the postbellum South. Often sickly during her childhood, Lucille Douglass read exotic travel books such as the Zig-Zag Journeys of Hezekiah Butterworth. She took art lessons from her mother, who taught at Alabama Conference Female College (later Huntingdon College). In 1895, Douglass received her A.B. from Alabama Conference Female College. ==Career==

In 1899 Douglass moved to Birmingham, working as an artist and art teacher. She supported herself in part by painting china and place cards. In 1920, Douglass went to China as an employee of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church. She organized and supervised a workshop in Shanghai, where Chinese women hand-colored photographic slides for the missionary society. Women were intentionally chosen as employees and were given opportunities to learn English and in some cases tuition to attend school. Douglass also became a writer and associate editor of Shanghai Times, an English-language publication. For the rest of her life, Douglass lived primarily in New York, traveling to Europe and Birmingham. During the winter of 1928–1929, she was a faculty member on the SS President Wilson, teaching art history, drawing and painting on a "floating university" that sailed around the world. In the New York Evening Post of November 6, 1928, Douglass was referred to as "one of America's best known painters and etchers". ==References==