About this work
The eye settles immediately on a face — composed, watchful, carrying the particular authority of a woman who has spent decades commanding stages and drawing rooms alike. *Odette Tyler Shepherd* is a 1927 pastel on pulpboard , rendered at an intimate scale — 20 by 15¾ inches — that concentrates everything into the sitter's presence. Barney's pastel handling is characteristically soft but never slack: fine strokes and layered textures build an ethereal atmosphere, the palette running through warm tones and pastel hues that evoke both nostalgia and a piercing inwardness. There is no theatrical prop or costume to signal who this woman is; the character lives entirely in the face and the directness of the gaze.
The subject is Elizabeth Lee Kirkland, an American actress, writer, and arts patron known professionally as Odette Tyler.
She had worked with Charles Frohman and William Faversham and was a popular comedian and actress. By the time Barney painted her in 1927, the couple had moved to California, where her husband R.D. MacLean was pursuing a film career, and Tyler herself had become a patron of the arts in Los Angeles, among the organizers of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and the women's wing of the Los Angeles Grand Opera Association. The two women were peers in a genuine sense — artists-turned-cultural-architects, each committed to the idea that civic life required serious attention to the arts. For Barney, the portrait belongs to the final, freely expressive phase of her career: by the 1920s, shifting tastes toward abstraction and modernism had begun to eclipse her Symbolist-inflected work, yet she kept painting on her own terms. The pastel medium, which she had favored throughout her career, allowed her to work with the speed and directness that late portraiture demands. The work now resides in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, gifted by Barney's daughters Laura Dreyfus Barney and Natalie Clifford Barney in memory of their mother.
This is a portrait for someone who gravitates toward faces — toward the specificity of a real person rather than the generality of a type. It belongs in a quiet room with good natural light: a study, a reading room, a bedroom with a high ceiling and pale walls. The warm, muted pastel palette makes it adaptable without being neutral; it has temperature and mood. It will speak to anyone drawn to the world of early American women — artists, performers, patrons — who shaped cultural life not from the margins but from the center, and whose portraits, this one included, are finally getting the sustained attention they deserve.
