Anne Waters Lyddane spent the entire 90 years of her life in Georgetown. She never married and lived with a sister and brother, who also did not marry. She spent her working career as a deputy clerk at the Federal District Court in Washington, where most of her career was serving as the courtroom clerk to Judge Jennings Bailey, the son of Sen. James Edmond Bailey of Tennessee, who had succeeded President Andrew Johnson in the U. S. Senate.
Judge Bailey had become a legendary figure in the District of Columbia legal community, having been appointed to the court by President Woodrow Wilson and serving into the Kennedy Administration. Anne spent her leisure time learning about art, taking lessons and working on her own compositions.
For many years she studied art in the classes taught by the late Guy Fairlamb, a specialist in portraiture, who was a cousin of Everett Fairlamb, who lived on Indian Creek in Northumberland County. She specialized in portraits and landscapes. She would define a portrait as a painting of a subject, whether human or animal, in which she saw unique characteristics worthy of being recorded. All of her subjects were real; she did not like abstract art.
She set up a studio on the third floor of her rowhouse in Georgetown, but her work took her into the field as well. In that regard, the lower Northern Neck and Catoctin Mountain in the Blue Ridge chain of northern Maryland were her favorite spots.
When she came to the Northern Neck, she would sit for hours in an outdoor setting, drawing and painting. She often said that shadowing was the most important element in a good painting. In that regard, with a landscape, she would wait until the sun was in the right spot to illuminate a scene and correspondingly, trees and angles of buildings would provide the proper shadowing.
She liked to make broad brush strokes, with decisive texture, capturing a person or a scene boldly. She was undaunted in doing her portraits. She had known Colonel Charles E. Stewart, the Alabama newspaper columnist, who later served as an administrative assistant attorney general in the Justice Department, and who in 1924 had appointed J. Edgar Hoover to head what then was termed the Division of Investigations, later the F.B.I.
He ended his career as the clerk of the Federal Court, where Anne came to know him. After his death in 1953, she was asked to paint his portrait to hang in the Federal Courthouse. She said it was one of her most difficult undertakings, as his hair had thinned, but remained dark, making the task of getting the shadowing correct very challenging. She did it well, and the portrait remains a significant part of the Court’s art collection.
Anne never charged for a portrait, saying that painting was her hobby. She would make nominal charges for landscapes or pictures of animals at art shows, but her goal was to get her paintings into homes and other venues where they would be appreciated. A few years ago, I was in an elegant home in North Carolina, and when I went in the library, above the mantel I saw one of Anne’s paintings of a mallard duck. Ducks and puppies were among her favorite subjects.
She thought First Lady Barbara Bush would be an interesting composition, as she had not painted a person with snow white hair. She labored on it intensely contrasting the white hair with a brilliant azure dress. Anne did not like background scenes in her portraits, preferring to keep the focus solely on the subject. Many of her portraits were acts of love, notably in the case of the one of Judge Bailey.
When she came to the Northern Neck, Anne enjoyed engaging in repartee with the late F. R. Hillier, one of our local distinguished portrait artists. Their comments on each other’s works were prescient and humorous, showing great respect for one another, which always included a bit of amusing dialog. Anne died in 2009; her art continues to inspire.
