Though unjustifiably relegated to relative obscurity today, Florence Louise (Walton) Pomeroy was, during a long and productive life, something of a Renaissance woman.  Among other accomplishments, she was the individual women’s foil fencing national champion in 1917, a captain in the Red Cross during World War I, a talented bookbinder and, above all, a gifted painter. 

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     Born in East Orange, New Jersey, she spent the last seventy years of her life resident in Llewellyn Park, a unique and exclusive enclave in West Orange which was home to such prominent individuals as Thomas Alva Edison.

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     Pomeroy  graduated from the Masters School, a private boarding school in Dobbs Ferry, New York, before studying art with such luminaries as George Bellows, B.J.O. Nordfeldt and Ann Goldthwaite and at the New York School of Applied Design for Women. A member of the National Association of Women Artists (a/k/a National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors) and the Montclair Art Association, she exhibited frequently in New York City with the NAWA, the Society of Independent Artists and at the National Academy of Design.  In 1947, Pomeroy was accorded the honor of a solo exhibition at New York’s Bonestell Gallery.*  The twenty-eight works shown included portraits, still lifes, landscapes, seascapes and genre paintings in both oil and tempera. Among the offerings was Confidences.  “Florence Pomeroy . . . was . . . at her best in single figure compositions where she could give all her attention to strong characterization and substantial paint quality,” wrote the reviewer for The Art Digest.**  

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        It is such “strong characterization” that distinguishes Confidences, a deft portrayal of seamstresses of two generations (perhaps mother and daughter) collaborating on the creation or alteration of an article of clothing.  Pomeroy’s expert rendition of her subjects’ hands at work is remarkable, as is her strong use of color: the vivid whites, purples and greens of the garments that hang on the divider in the upper half of the composition are repeated diagonally below in the younger woman’s white dress, the purple fabric she sews and the green cloth covering of the table in the lower half.  And while the handiwork of the women dominates the lower left quadrant of the canvas, the true focus of the work (and the source of its title) is the implied conversation in which the younger woman apparently confides in her older counterpart, the latter listening intently as she works.​  

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*Pomeroy was also the subject of a solo exhibition of her watercolors at The Bodley Gallery in New York City in 1959.

**Reed, Judith K., The Art Digest, "Fifty-Seventh Street in Review," April 15, 1947, p. 32.