Draft:Zerelda Rains

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Zerelda Rains (1874–1963) was a prize-winning American painter and graphic designer whose work was widely exhibited during her lifetime. She is credited with filling a void in the art world by creating courses in applied art instruction and starting the Graphic Design program at Parsons.

Rains became well known as a leading exponent of Dynamic Symmetry and had a teaching career that spanned nearly fifty years. Her students included the artist Emma Bell Miles, Irene Steele, Flora Loveman, Isabel Temple, Juliet McClatchey, Helen Musgrave, Lilian Hope, Lela Grant, and fashion illustrator Irma Crutchfield.

Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Rains moved to Chattanooga in the summer of 1887, where the family resided in the newly established Highland Park neighborhood. In the fall 1887, Rains enrolled in Miss Ellen Smith's Seminary for Girls. After graduating in 1889, she studied painting with artists George W. Chambers in Nashville, and Josephine Willard in Chattanooga.

From 1890-1893, Rains studied painting at the St. Louis School of Fine Art, along with Modena Willard and Emma Owens. In 1892, Rains and Willard and some of their friends started an Art League in Chattanooga. Several paintings by members of the group, including those of Rains, were included in the 1893 World's Fair.

In 1891, Rains, a member of the Unitarian faith, began conducting Saturday morning art classes for children of Missionary Ridge, Tennessee, and, in 1897, along with Willard and others, opened the progressive Lend-A-Hand Club, a free night school sponsored by the Unitarian Church to provide vocational instruction to local factory workers.

In 1895, Rains moved to New York City with her friend, Lenore Doster Cook, to study at the Art Students League. In 1896, the two women spent a formative summer studying with William Merritt Chase and Rhoda Holmes Nicholls at the Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art. At the end of the term, Chase selected Rains' work for inclusion in the annual exhibitions of the Art School. That same summer, Rains met the painter Martha Walter, with whom she became lifelong friends, the two frequently traveling and spending their holidays together.

Returning to Chattanooga in 1896, Rains opened an art colony called the Lookout Mountain Summer Art School and taught art at various private academies including the Hickman and Grace Schools. One of her early pupils was the Appalachian painter and writer Emma Bell Miles. Rains and Miles remained in close contact throughout Miles's life.

From 1898-1900, Rains taught at the St. Louis School of Fine Art. Along with Walter, Rains returned to the Shinnecock School of Art in 1900, where she studied with Chase for three months before becoming his studio assistant at the end of the term.

In 1900, Rains was commissioned by the Norfolk and Western Railroad to paint the Natural Bridge in Virginia. In 1902, Rains founded the Snow Farm Summer Art School in Ogden, Tennessee, near Dayton, Ohio, where she had a studio. The school was closely modeled on Chase's summer art colony and included a log cabin studio and a log cabin dormitory. Rains led the summer school in Ogden through 1905.

Rains spent the winter of 1902-1903, with Walter studying art in Philadelphia, and with William Merritt Chase at the Chase School of Art in New York City.

In 1903, with her friend and fellow Chase student, the painter Hilda Belcher, Rains created a bas-relief coin depicting the famous literary sisters from Chattanooga, Grace MacGowan Cooke and Alice MacGowan.

Rains and her sister Edith spent the summer of 1906 at the artist colony in Gloucester, Mass., where Walter also summered, and Walter accompanied Rains to Chattanooga on several occasions, including in June of 1910.

A devotee of the summer art colonies, in 1910 and 1911, Rains taught at Frank Parson's summer in the Berkshire Mountains at Chester, Massachusetts. In 1911, Walter visited Rains in Chattanooga in June, and then the two traveled to Chester, where they taught painting. In 1912 and 1913, Rains taught at the New York School of Fine Arts summer school in Boothbay, Maine. In 1914, Rains and designer Grace M. Fuller developed another summer art school for the study of costume and clothing design at Belle Terre, Long Island.

In 1907, Rains moved permanently to New York where she began a 30 year career at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts, successor to the Chase School of Art. In 1917, she established a branch of the New York School of Fine Arts at the University of Chattanooga. Intended as the southern outpost of the Parsons School of Design, students took their first year of study in Chattanooga before transferring to New York for the duration of their study. The program was also designed to provide instruction to art teachers in the public schools, as well as to local children.

Rains lived in New York with Fuller, who was also her co-worked at her co-worker, the New York School. Among their other associates were the director of the school and her former teacher, Frank Alva Parsons, along with other former Chase students Martha Walter, Susan F. Bissell, and R. Sloan Bredin. One of Rains's class assignments at the art school included designing hats for Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon. Following WWI, Rains and Fuller were instrumental in establishing the European branch of the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts in Paris, France. After Parson's death, Rains and Fuller retired to their home, Rainsfields, at Bedford Hills, New York

Rains's sister, Edith L. Raines, trained as a nurse at St. Luke's Hospital, in New York, and served at the Grenfell Medical Mission in Labrador in 1913, and with the Red Cross on a naval hospital ship and in France, during WWI. In a letter home to her family in 1919, she notes the untimely death of Emma Bell Miles.