Artist Madge Tennent was in her mid-30s, married and the mother of two boys, when she arrived in Hawai'i and found her muse.
Over the course of nearly five decades, Tennent would become the greatest exponent of the Hawaiian female form. Her swirling, broad-stroked drawings and paintings of Hawaiian women prompted comparisons to the great French artist Gauguin, whose own robust paintings of Tahitian women had become an inspiration for Tennent after arriving in Honolulu.
Tennent's "heroic oil paintings" were a statement, one critic noted years after her death, "about the mass, form, movement, grace and sadness of the Hawaiian figure."
Tennent was born Madeline Grace Cook in Dulwich, England, in 1889. She was deemed a prodigy at age 14 and sent to study art in Paris rather than to pursue a formal education.
She was married in 1915 and spent several years in New Zealand and Samoa before sailing with her family to England in 1923. The ship stopped in Honolulu, where the family decided to stay.
Tennent began painting portraits of Hawaiians and multiracial children, and also opened a studio on Liliha Street, where she taught art and lectured.
"All great art is simple, without trivialities and frills," she once said.
She quickly won popularity in Hawai'i and abroad, but one European critic bemoaned the fact that her subjects were "elephantine" and "do not make the tropics particularly attractive."
The artist gave away many of her paintings or allowed them to be sold for charity. She called money "very boring."
Two heart attacks in the late 1950s and failing health ended her painting days in 1965. She spent her remaining years in Maunalani Hospital, making only occasional public appearances.
Tennent died in 1972. She was 82.
