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A self-portrait by Louise Heron Blair Daura, Class of 1927, is part of the exhibition “Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1930–1939,” which opens in April at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. The museum’s description states that the exhibition “illuminates the accomplishments of 60 convention-defying women who crossed the Atlantic to pursue personal and professional aspirations in the vibrant cultural milieu of Paris.”

Featuring portraiture and biography, “Brilliant Exiles” also includes such notable American women as Josephine Baker, Isadora Duncan, Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Gertrude Stein.

After graduating from Bryn Mawr in 1927, Louise Heron Blair went to Paris to study art, where she met an artist from Barcelona, Pierre Daura. They married in 1928 and became part of a social circle of influential artists, writers, musicians, gallery owners, and critics during the 1930s. Although Pierre’s works became better known, Louise was a talented artist in her own right, painting striking portraits of herself, friends, and relatives, as well as landscapes.

Bryn Mawr Special Collections owns letters she wrote to her family in Richmond, Va., while at Bryn Mawr, while traveling in Europe, and during the Spanish Civil War, when Pierre was fighting against General Francisco Franco. The couple, along with their daughter, Martha, divided their time between Rockbridge Baths, Va., outside Lexington, and a medieval village in southern France.

TOP RIGHT
Louise He on Blair (American, 1905–1972). Self-portrait, 1929. Oil on board, 23 1/2 × 18 5/8 in. Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Gift of Martha Randolph Daura.

MIDDLE AND BOTTOM RIGHT
Items from Louise Heron Blair’s time at Bryn Mawr showed she had a sense of humor—including a made-up insurance company that allowed students to “insure” their performance on exams, of a College,” a tongue-in-cheek rewriting of Bryn Mawr social life as a caste system based on seniority.