Blanche Lazzell (1878 - 1956). Blanche Lazzell was an American painter, printmaker and designer. Known especially for her white-line woodcuts, she was an early modernist American artist, bringing elements of Cubism and abstraction into her art. Born in a small farming community in West Virginia, Lazzell traveled to Europe twice, studying in Paris with French artists Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, and André Lhote. In 1915, she began spending her summers in the Cape Cod art community of Provincetown, Massachusetts, and eventually settled there permanently. She was one of the founding members of the Provincetown Printers, a group of artists who experimented with a white-line woodcut technique based on the Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Nettie Blanche Lazzell was born on a farm near Maidsville, West Virginia, to Mary Prudence Pope and Cornelius Carhart Lazzell. Her father was a direct descendant of Reverend Thomas and Hannah Lazzell, pioneers who settled in Monongalia County after the American Revolutionary War. The Lazzells were devout Methodists, attending the Bethel Methodist Episcopal Church. The ninth of ten children, she was nicknamed Pet by her older brother Rufus, a name that her family would continue to use throughout her life. She grew up on the 200 acre family farm, attending a one-room schoolhouse on the property where students from the first through eighth grades were taught from October through February. Her mother died when she was twelve. When Lazzell was fifteen, she enrolled in the West Virginia Conference Seminary in Buckhannon. Probably sometime prior to her entering the Seminary she became partially deaf, although the exact origin of her condition is unclear. In 1894 she sought treatment from a Baltimore doctor who blamed her deafness on catarrh. In 1899, Lazzell enrolled in the South Carolina Co-educational Institute. Upon graduation later that year, she became a teacher at the Red Oaks School in Ramsey, South Carolina. In spring of 1900, she returned to Maidsville, where she tutored her younger sister, Bessie. Lazzell was matriculated into the West Virginia University in 1901 and decided to study fine art. While her education was paid for by her father, she kept a strict account of her expenditures and took a job coloring photographs at Frieds, a studio in Morgantown. She took drawing and art history classes from William J. Leonard and studied with Eva E. Hubbard. In June 1905 Lazzell was graduated, earning her degree in fine arts. She continued to study at WVU off and on until 1909, furthering her art studies and twice substituting as a painting teacher for Hubbard. During this time she learned ceramics, gold etching, and china decoration. She enrolled in the Art Students League of New York in 1908 where she studied under painters Kenyon Cox and William Merritt Chase. Georgia O'Keeffe attended the league during the same period, but it is not clear whether the two attended classes together. In 1908, Lazzell's father died and she left the Art Students League. Lazzell boarded the SS Ivernia on July 3, 1912, bound for Europe on a summer tour arranged by the American Travel Club. The tour began in England and continued through the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy, where Lazzell studied the architecture of churches. In August she left the tour and traveled to Paris, where she stayed at a pension in Montparnasse on the Left Bank. She attended lectures by Florence Heywood and Rossiter Howard, avoided the cafe life, and joined the Students Hostel on Boulevard Saint-Michel. While in Paris, Lazzell took classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Académie Julian, and Académie Delécluse, eventually settling in at the Académie Moderne where she studied with post-impressionist painter Charles Guérin and David Rosen. Lazzell felt most comfortable at the Moderne, which was associated with the Parisian avant-garde. She embarked upon a six-week sketching tour of Italy with four other young women in February 1913. The quintet returned to Paris via Germany where Lazzell partook in her first glass of beer in Munich. In April she visited an ear specialist who removed a growth from the back of her throat, resulting in what she characterized as a slight improvement in her hearing. She continued to study with Guérin, who recognized Lazzell's inclination for landscape art. Lazzell extended her stay in France and attended lectures at the Louvre concerning Flemish paintings, Dutch art and the Italian Renaissance. She returned to the United States at the end of September, sailing from London on the SS Arabic of the White Star Line. Upon returning to Morgantown, Lazzell focused on painting and lived with her sister Bessie. She held a solo exhibition in December 1914 that included her sketches and paintings.