Annie Gooding Sykes is one of the many women associated with the artistic community of Cincinnati, Ohio at the turn of the century. She initiated her formal studies at the Lowell Institute in Boston, Massachusetts in 1875, attending drawing classes there until 1878, when she enrolled at the school of the Museum of Fine Arts. Following her marriage to Gerritt Sykes in 1882, the couple moved to Cincinnati, a flourishing cultural center known as the “Queen City of the West.” Sykes enrolled at the Cincinnati Art Academy in 1884, and throughout the next ten years, continued to refine her skills studying under such noted American painters as Frank Duveneck and Thomas Satterwhite Noble. Sykes exhibited actively in and around Boston and Cincinnati, and like many other artists of the day, spent numerous summers in Maine painting land, sea, and sky. Although she occasionally worked in oil, watercolor became Sykes’ favorite medium of expression, and her sophisticated works have a sense of poetry arising from their harmony of form and color.
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