Label Type
Mystery MondayLabel
Happy Monday from Purdue Galleries! This famous faculty member would have celebrated her birthday today. Can you identify her, and do you know where this painting hangs? Make sure to check in and see if you are correct.
The answer is Purdue’s own aviatrix Amelia Earhart (1897-ca. 1937), and this large oil painting hangs in the common area of Earhart Hall.
Earhart was born in Kansas and spent her childhood moving across the Midwest including Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois. Her father was fascinated with flight and encouraged his daughter from a very young age though she turned him down when he offered to pay for her to fly as a passenger at the Iowa State Fair when she was ten.
After graduating from high school in Chicago, Earhart worked as a nurse taking care of soldiers returning from World War I. It was during this time that Earhart developed her own interest in flight. The stories of the ace pilots and their adventures were thrilling to her, and she began to attend aerial performances where pilots demonstrated tricks in mid-air and held races.
At the age of twenty-three Earhart took her first ride in a plane and was instantly hooked. Within a month she began flying lessons with another pioneering female aviator, Neta “Snooky” Snooks (1896-1991). By 1923, Earhart earned her pilot’s license and had already set a world record of height reached by a female flyer in her yellow Kinner Airster biplane, nicknamed The Canary.
Earhart made international news in 1928 when she became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic with two male colleagues, though she did not pilot the plane. She used her new celebrity to encourage and promote air travel and women in the industry, a practice that would continue during her short time at Purdue. In 1932, Earhart achieved her dream and became the first female aviator to fly solo non-stop across the Atlantic, a feat that had first been accomplished five years earlier by Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974). She continued to set new records for speed and distance during the next few years, entering dozens of races.
In 1935, Earhart was hired by Purdue as a visiting faculty member in the Department of Aeronautics and as an advisor for female students. She also began to plan her fateful around the world flight sponsored by the university. On July 2, 1937, Earhart and her co-pilot Fred Noonan (1893-ca. 1937) took off from Lae, Papua New Guinea headed to Howland Island. Despite a massive search and rescue mission, Earhart and Noonan were never found and were declared dead two years later. There are many theories about what happened to them and her Lockheed Electra plane, but there are no answers to the almost 90-year-old mystery.
This painting was donated to Purdue University in 1939 by George Palmer Putnam (1887-1950), Earhart’s widower. The artist is Brynjulf Strandenaes (1890-1952), sometimes Anglicized as Bryn Strandenaes. Strandenaes was a Norwegian-American portrait painter who lived and worked in New York City. Here is a Purdue archives link to a 1928 photograph of him in the process of painting our Earhart portrait (https://earchives.lib.purdue.edu/digital/collection/earhart/id/754).
The pose for this portrait was taken from an undated photograph of Earhart standing on a ledge with her hands in her pockets wearing her leather flying jacket, cap, and goggles looking off pensively in the distance (https://earchives.lib.purdue.edu/digital/collection/earhart/id/911/). This image captures her monumental presence and calm resoluteness. Strandenaes added billowing clouds and changed the ledge to a mountain peak, giving the viewer a sense that she is about to take off into the sky.
Be sure to swing by Earhart Hall to wish Amelia Earhart a happy 126th birthday and thank her for being a fearless trailblazer.
Title: Portrait of Amelia Earhart
Artist: Brynjulf Strandenaes (1890-1952), Norwegian-American
Date: 1928
Medium: Oil on canvas
Technique: Painting
Accession number: PAI.76