Draft:Zerelda Rains

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Zerelda Rains (1874–1963) was a widely renowned, prize-winning American painter and graphic designer. whose pioneering work was widely exhibited during her lifetime.

She became well known as a leading exponent of Dynamic Symmetry and had a distinguished teaching career that spanned nearly fifty years. Her students included the artist Emma Bell Miles, Irene Steele, Flora Loveman, Isabel Temple, Juliet McClatchey, Helen Musgrave, Lilian Hope, Lela Grant, and fashion illustrator Irma Crutchfield. In 1900, she was commissioned by the Norfolk and Western Railroad to paint the Natural Bridge in Virginia.

Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Rains moved to Chattanooga, in the summer of 1887, where the family resided in the third house built in the Highland Park neighborhood. In the fall 1887, Rains enrolled in Miss Ellen Smith's Seminary for Girls. After graduating in 1889, she studied painting  with artists George W. Chambers in Nashville, and Josephine Willard in Chattanooga. Chase selected her work for inclusion in the annual exhibitions of the Art School.

From 1890-1893, she studied painting at the St. Louis School of Fine Art along with Modena Willard and Emma Owens. Several of their paintings were included in the 1893 World's Fair. Rains and Willard, along with some of their friends, started an Art League in Chattanooga in 1892.

In 1895, Rains went to New York with her friend Lenore Doster Cook and studied at the Art Students League. In 1896, the two spent a formative summer studying with William Merritt Chase and Rhoda Holmes Nicholls at the Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art. There, Rains met the painter Martha Walter with whom she became good friends, the two frequently spending their holidays together. Rains and Walter returned to the Shinnecock School of Art in 1900, studying with Chase for three months before becoming his studio assistant at the end of the term.

Rains taught at the St. Louis School of Fine Art from 1888-1900. Returning to Chattanooga, she opened an art studio called the Lookout Mountain Summer Art School and taught art at various private academies including the Hickman and Grace Schools. One of her early pupils was the Appalachian painter and writer Emma Bell Miles. Rains and Miles would remain in close contact throughout Miles's life.

A Unitarian, in 1891 Rains began conducting Saturday morning art classes for children of Missionary Ridge, Tennesse, and, in 1897, along with Willard and others, opened the progressive Lend-A-Hand Club, a free night school sponsored by the Unitarian Church to provide vocational instruction to local factory workers. With Hilda Belcher, in 1903, Rains created a Bas-Relief Coin depicting the famous literary sisters from Chattanooga, Grace MacGowan Cooke and Alice MacGowan.

In 1902, Rains founded the Snow Farm Summer Art School in Ogden, Tennessee, near Dayton, where she had a studio. The school was closely modeled on Chase's summer art colony and included a log cabin studio and a log cabin dormitory. She led that school through the summer of 1905. Rains spent the winter of 1902-1903, with Walter studying art in Philadelphia, and with William Merritt Chase at the Chase School of Art in New York. She and her sister Edith spent the summer of 1906 at the artist colony in Gloucester, Mass., where Walter also summered. Walter accompanied Rains to Chattanooga on several occasions, including in June of 1910.

A devotee of the summer art colonies, in 1910 and 1911, Rains taught at Frank Parson's summer in the Berkshire Mountains at Chester, Massachusetts. In 1911, Walter again visited Rains in Chattanooga in June and then accompanied her to Chester, where she also taught painting. In 1912 and 1913 , she taught at the New York School of Fine Arts summer schools in Boothbay, Maine. In 1914, Rains and designer Grace M. Fuller developed another summer art school for the study of costume and clothing design at Belle Terre, Long Island.

In 1907, she moved to New York where she began a 30 year career at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts, successor to the Chase School of Art. In 1917, she established a branch of the New York School of Fine Arts at the University of Chattanooga. Intended as the southern outpost of the Parsons School of Design, students took their first year of study in Chattanooga before transferring to New York for the duration of their study. The program was also designed to provide instruction to art teachers in the public schools, as well as to local children.

Rains lived in New York with her co-worker, the designer Grace M. Fuller. Among their associates at the New York School were the director of the school and her former teacher, Frank Alva Parsons, along with other former Chase students Martha Walter, Susan F. Bissell, and R. Sloan Bredin. One of Rains's class assignments at the art school included designing hats for Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon. The Irma Crutchfield credited Rains for filling a void in the art world by creating courses in applied art instruction. Following WWI, Rains and Fuller were instrumental in establishing the the European branch of the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts in Paris, France. After Parson's death, Rains and Fuller retired to their home, Rainsfields, at Bedford Hills, New York

Rains's sister, Edith L. Raines, trained as a nurse at St. Luke's Hospital, in New York, and served at the Grenfell Medical Mission in Labrador in 1913, and with the Red Cross on a naval hospital ship and in France, during WWI. In a letter home to her family in 1919, she notes the untimely death of Emma Bell Miles.