Portrait of Caroline Mary Rudd Allen
Title/Subject: Caroline Mary Rudd Allen (American, 1820-1892)
Artist: Thomas E. Stephens (Welsh-American, 1886-1966)
Date: 1937
Type: painting
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 30" h x 25" w
Collection: Paintings, Prints, Drawings and other Framed Items (RG 40)
Caroline Mary Rudd was one of the first three women to receive college degrees in the U.S., all at Oberlin College in 1841. The others were Mary Hosford and Elizabeth Prall. The program included a required study of Latin and Greek, languages Rudd had heard growing up as her father taught boys who were preparing for college. Rudd came to Oberlin as a student from Huntington, Connecticut in 1835. Family remembered that Mary, as friends and family called her, went home only once during her time at Oberlin, as travel was difficult and expensive in the 1830s, by way of the Erie Canal. In 1841 following her graduation, she married George Nelson Allen, an Oberlin graduate of 1838. Caroline Mary was active in the Oberlin Female Moral Reform Society, as a student and after her marriage, along with Oberlin students Lucy Stone and Antoinette Blackwell. The Oberlin Society was the first auxiliary to the New York Moral Reform Society, itself formed as an auxiliary to the American Society for Promoting the Observance of the Seventh Covenant.The year of their marriage George Allen was appointed Professor of Music and Principal of Oberlin's Preparatory Department, which provided education at the secondary level for a range of ages. He received the Master of Arts from Oberlin in 1848. He is credited with building impressive church music and community choir programs at Oberlin with orchestra and chorus. Excellence in music continued at Oberlin and led, eventually, to the establishment of the Conservatory of Music. In 1847 George Allen was appointed Professor of Geology and Natural History, while continuing his work in music until 1864. He retired from his professorship in 1871. The Allens had five children, all of whom attended Oberlin College. They moved to Cincinnati, Ohio in 1874, where their son was a professor. George Allen died there in 1877; Caroline Mary died in 1892.
The Welsh-American painter of Caroline Mary Rudd Allen's portrait, Thomas Edgar Stephens, worked from a reproduction of a daguerreotype of her dated ca. 1853 (right). Stephens created the portrait in 1937, the year of the Centennial of Coeducation at Oberlin. It was exhibited at Oberlin that year, and later purchased by the College. The painting was treated by the Intermuseum Conservation Association in 2008.
Stephens painted portraits of several U.S. presidents (he was a friend of Eisenhower's), the Duke of Windsor and Winston Churchill. His works are in the National Gallery of Art, the U.S. Supreme Court, the Pentagon, Walter Reed Hospital, the U.S. Military Academy and Naval Academy, West Point, the Eisenhower Museum, the Legion of Honor Gallery in Paris, the U.S. Embassy in London, I.B.M., Cornell University, Columbia University, Harvard University, the Harry Truman Library and others. Several of his portraits were featured on the covers of Time and Life Magazine.
Sources
Caroline Mary Rudd Allen student file, Graduates and Former Students (RG 28).
Welsh Icons News, accessed 9/10/2020.
Related Collections
George Nelson Allen Family Papers (RG 30/67)
Archives Museum Collection