The Cornwall Library is honored to present a memorial exhibit of artwork by Erica Child Prud’homme (1932–2026). The show includes oil paintings and watercolors from her personal archive, and encompasses landscapes, seascapes, still lifes, and mandalas. Thanks to the great generosity of her family, all proceeds from art sales will benefit the Cornwall Library’s art programs and cultural events.
“My work has always been driven by a love of the natural world, its forms, colors, and light,” Prud’homme said. “The order and grace of natural forms, both living and dying, are captivating.”
She was fascinated by the symmetry and grace found in landscapes and seascapes, the relationship of human bodies to natural forms, by the repetitive patterns in waves, fish-scales and wood grains, and by the change in seasons.
Prud’homme was raised in the artistic enclave of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and was influenced by her father and uncle, Charles and Paul Child, both working artists, and her mother, Fredericka, a bookbinder and local theater producer.
After graduating from Middlebury College, she did graduate studies in anthropology at the University of New Mexico and studied at the Art Students League in New York City. She worked as an architectural draftsman in Philadelphia and as an exhibition designer at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan.
Over a career spanning nearly 50 years, Prud’homme exhibited widely. In Cornwall, she showed at the library, at the Rose Algrant Art Show, and in the pages of the Cornwall Chronicle. In New York, she was a member of the Blue Mountain Gallery. In Connecticut, she showed at the Washington Arts Association, Yale’s Sterling Library, and the New Arts Gallery. In Massachusetts, she showed at the Berkshire Museum, the Attleboro Arts Museum, the Geoffrey Young Gallery, the Norman Rockwell Museum, and the Sheffield Museum. And in Maine, she exhibited at the Penobscot Marine Museum.
A sampling of Erica Prud’homme’s work can be found here.
The show will hang through June 20.
