Preface

For years, growing up, I stared across my grandmother’s dining room table at the portrait of a little girl, dressed all in white, in a dark forest. Her eyes followed me, and she was holding what I thought was a pelican. Later in life, I realized the portrait was of my grand-mother, for whom I am named, and she was holding a bunny. The portrait had been painted by her father, Eugene Alonzo Poole. Later, I came across the studio photograph that my great-grandfather had painted from, adding in the nature background. His portraits and landscapes filled our house while I was growing up as well—autumn landscapes and stern portraits of family members. Then, by sheer luck, I came across a series of small, fascinating landscapes that had been stored in an old trunk in a shed on my grandparents’ property. They had also been painted by my great-grandfather. By then, my mother, Virginia McGinnes Webb, had started researching her grandfather’s life and had compiled a collection of notes, lists of his paintings, and a brief outline of his life.

A lifelong historian, she traveled to Pennsylvania and Pittsburg, tracking down his paintings and his story. Her mother, Aileen Poole McGinnes, had kept a few of Poole’s diaries and letters. When my mother died in 2021, I inherited her plastic crate of Poole research and decided to finish what she had started. E.A. Poole was not a prolific diarist; his entries were intermittent and provided an occasional glance into his thinking and life. The threads of an interesting life are found in hispaintings, reports of his travels, and family remembrances, however. My goal was to explore his life and career, placed in the context of the times in which he lived. I also wanted to honor my mother’s goal to catalog and share a list and location of as many of his paintings as we could find. I hope you enjoy the life of this American artist,Eugene Alonzo Cost Poole.

Aileen Webb, 2024