Cincinnati loved Elizabeth Nourse.

She was like the teachers-pet/super-nerd, killing it in every subject the Cincinnati School of Design offered, doing extracurriculars like starting the Cincinatti Etching Club, she even had the heartbreaking home life in which both of her financially-ruined parents died within a year of each other and still managed to be better than everybody else. When she graduated the school proposed…that she stay in Cincinnati and teach alongside her mentors. She straight up refused and did the sensible thing: save some money, grab her older sister and skip town for Paris.

Her professor in Paris ran out of things to teach Nourse in 3 months, so she struck out on her own to make a living as an artist. Which she did thoroughly. Unlike her friend Mary Cassatt and also like pretty much every other artist around 1900, Nourse had no inheritance, nor did she have any interest in teaching, those that can’t do teach but girl could do so she damn-well did.

She bopped around Europe and North Africa like the OG sadboi French modernist philosophers, except instead of writing self-indulgent treatises she painted humanizing, complicated, thoroughly modern portraits of the characters she met. The French patriarchy loved Nourse: her first painting in the Salon was hung at eye level (a very French kind of compliment), Rodin invited her into the New Salon where her peers awarded her mad honors, the French Government bought her painting Les Violet Clos for their permanent collection.

But Nourse did not love the French patriarchy, or any patriarchy. She never married, kept her sister Louise by her side at all times, and only visited women during her travels. Gallery owners asked her to paint hotter peasant women which Nourse obviously didn’t do: Peasants, they woke up like this, flawless. Nourse was probably on some Back to the Future time travel. Her selfies present her as shockingly single and professional. Her personal essays probably wouldn’t do well on Buzzfeed but they killed it in Art and Progress. Unlike her counterparts she was way modest; her personal diary is more like ‘look how generous all these other artists are to the war refugees’ even though she herself was recognized as “most badass Catholic humanitarian of 1921.” Can we get one of those sainthood petitions started?

Basically Nourse was too good. When her painting Mother Feeding Her Baby went up for auction in New York bearing a fake Mary Casset signature, karma made sure it slipped out of our grubby, ungrateful hands and never returned.