Ellen Biddle Shipman
| Ellen Biddle Shipman | |
|---|---|
Shipman at Beekman Place, her NYC home.
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| Born |
Ellen Biddle November 5, 1896 Philadelphia, PA, United States |
| Died | March 27, 1950 (aged 53) Warwick Camp, Bermuda |
| Residence | Plainfield, New Hampshire |
| Education | Radcliffe College |
| Occupation | Landscape architect |
| Known for | Landscape architecture, garden design |
| Notable work | Longue Vue House and Gardens, Sarah P. Duke Gardens, Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site |
| Children | Evan Biddle Shipman, horse racing authority. See Evan Shipman Handicap |
| Parent(s) | James Biddle, Ellen McGowan Biddle |
Ellen Biddle Shipman (November 5, 1869 – March 27, 1950) was an American landscape architect known for her formal gardens and lush planting style. Along with Beatrix Farrand and Marian Cruger Coffin, she dictated the style of the time and strongly influenced landscape design as a member of the first generation to break into the largely male occupation.
Commenting about the male dominated field to the New York Times in 1938, she said "before women took hold of the profession, landscape architects were doing what I call cemetery work." Shipman preferred to look on her career of using plantings as if she "were painting pictures as an artist." Little of her work remains today because of the labor-intensive style of her designs, but there exist preserved spaces, including the Sarah P. Duke Gardens at Duke University, often cited as one of the most beautiful American college campuses.
She is buried in Plainfield, New Hampshire, near Brook Place, her estate there.
Shipman was born in Philadelphia, and she spent her childhood in Texas and the Arizona territory. Her father, Colonel James Biddle, was a career Army officer, stationed on the western frontier. When the safety of his family was threatened, he moved them to the McGowan farm in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Shipman attended boarding school in Baltimore, Maryland, where her interests in the arts emerged and by her twenties she had already started drawing garden designs.
When she entered the Harvard annex, Radcliffe College, Shipman met a playwright attending Harvard named Louis Shipman. They left school after one year, married, and moved to Plainfield, New Hampshire, in the Cornish Art Colony, which included Maxfield Parrish and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The colony is said to have been landscaped by artists who were not architects, but had artistically trained eyes and an awareness for the aesthetics of repose, which gave rise to a collection of some of the finest gardens in the country. Shipman took strongly to the Cornish style, one that focused on geometric patterns and colonial plantings, and with it created her own style – a style which did not go unnoticed.
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