Colorado & Regional Art

Louise Emerson was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1901. Much of her early life was spent in New York where she graduated from Barnard College in 1922 and attended the Art Students League for three years. She spent the summers of 1923 and 1924 at the École d’Art Américaines at Fontainebleau, France, where she learned fresco painting from Paul-Albert Baudoin, a student of Puvis de Chavannes. In the summer of 1925, she and her sister Isabel were guests of Mabel Dodge Luhan at her compound in Taos, New Mexico, where she met her future husband, artist Arnold Rönnebeck. After their marriage in New York in 1926, Louise and her new husband relocated to Denver where he served as director of the Denver Art Museum. Proficient in oil, tempera and watercolor, Ronnebeck worked in a representational style often painting children, historical events, Colorado’s ghost towns and vignettes from city life. A sizable portion of her work comprises mural painting during the 1930s and early 1940s, including two murals for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in Casper, Wyoming and Grand Junction, Colorado. From 1945 to 1951 she was Assistant Professor of Drawing and Painting in the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Denver. In 1948 with some of her artist colleagues at the university, she became a founding member of the 15 Colorado Artists that split from the more traditional Denver Artists Guild. She had a solo exhibition at the Denver Art Museum in 1928 and participated in many national group exhibitions. Following the marriages of her two children, she moved to Bermuda. In 1973 she returned to Denver where she spent the remaining years of her life.