Franklin Watkins (1894-1972)
Portrait of Jane Drummond (Remember Me), c. 1943
 Franklin Watkins came to Pennsylvania by a circuitous route. Born in New York, he grew up in North Carolina. He enrolled first at the University of Virginia and then at the University of Pennsylvania, before entering the Pennsylvania Academy, where he studied on and off between 1913 and 1918 (he began his twenty-five year teaching career there in 1943). Thereafter he remained in Philadelphia for most of his career, and by the mid-twenties his distinctive romantic realist style had emerged. He became famous in 1931, when his Suicide in Costume (Philadelphia Museum of Art) won first prize at the Carnegie International. The expressive style, unusual color sensibility, distortion of form and gesture are all typical of his work. The artist’s first one-man show was held in 1934.
Andrew Carnduff Ritchie felt Watkins produced “some of the finest portraits painted today in America,” many prominent Philadelphians posed for him. His portrait of Jane Drummond (also titled Remember Me) is an ethereal image of his youthful subject, a girl in her late teens clad in a white dress. Her dreamy pose shows the artist’s interest in creating a psychological mood rather than making a dutiful rendition of his subject’s features: “Early in the game I rejected my gift for quick and easy likenesses in suspicion that it was too easily come by.” Rather than recording a subject exactly, he interpreted what he saw, desiring to make “a picture of an image from that model that took shape in my head.” The subject, Jane Drummond, was an English girl who lived with an American family during World War II. A ribbon trails from the nosegay she holds with the inscription “Remember Me,” which combined with the 1945 date, implies that with the end of the war she may soon be returning to her native land. Her age also suggests she might also have just graduated from high school, when such mementos would have been popular.
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