Mrs. Koehler

When the old lady died in Rome in 1944, there were no long obituaries. Even to her most intimate friends, she was always simply "Mrs. Koehler." They thought she came from somewhere in the Midwest--nobody knew for sure.

Though she had been living on the edge of poverty, she willed her barbaric-looking jewelry and a wealth of exquisitely simple drawings and tempera paintings to a Providence lady who once befriended her. Last week, Mrs. Koehler's work went on exhibition in Providence.

At the turn of the century, when she was already middleaged, private commissions from British art patrons to fashion jewelry took her to London. There Novelist Henry James sat through some of her interminable monologues about art, nicknamed her "The Conversationalist."

She lived the rest of her days on the Continent, never bothered to speak anything except English. Her favorite word was "superb," which she applied equally to Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn and her favorite brand of unscented soap. She detested "Bohemianism, quaintness, affectation, whimsy, and--above all--effeteness." In art she tried to live up to her favorite Chinese maxim: "One should draw as if engraving a slab of rock crystal with a diamond point."

"Possibly, she became a little odd as people are apt to when they are poor and live too much alone," one of her friends confessed in a monograph for the show. "This was especially true during her last years in Rome, where she did . . . one very remarkable portrait of herself." Said one Providence critic after studying the portrait last week: "It is the face of a woman who, looking in a mirror, sees Death. . . ."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.