Born Jennie Byrd Bryan in 1857 in Elmhurst, Illinois (at the time known as "Cottage Hill"), she was the daughter of Thomas Barbour Bryan and the elder Jennie Byrd Bryan.[1] She was a member of the esteemed Barbour family through her paternal grandmother.[1][4]
She was a student of artist George Peter Alexander Healy, who, for six years, lived in a cottage adjacent to her family's Eagle Nest estate in Cottage Hill (Elmhurst).[5][6][7]
As an adult, residing in Washington, D.C., she was prominent in the city's society, and was a notable philanthropist.[8] Bryan continued to be an artist, establishing renown.[9][10] She had portraits displayed in collections across the country.[4]
She joined her older brother Charles Page Bryan, a diplomat, on many of his assignments abroad. For several years, she acted as a hostess at the United States Embassy to Japan while her brother served as United States ambassador to Japan.[8]
After her father's death, many of the paintings from his large collection of George Peter Alexander Healy's works had been inherited by her.[16] In 1920, her widowed husband gave a collection of forty masterpieces to the State of Virginia, a gift valued at time at over $1 million.[16] In this gift were several of the paintings by Healy.[16] This gift, which was given by her widowed husband alongside a financial gift of $100,000 for a museum to house the art, came with a stipulation that the state must match his gift. This was eventually done in 1932, and construction began on the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.[17] The gift had been made in memory of both Jennie Byrd Bryan Payne and her mother-in-law, Elizabeth Barton Payne.[18]
References
^ abcdefgh"Bryan001". www.elmhursthistory.org. Elmhurst Historical Society. Archived from the original on May 28, 2021. Retrieved January 1, 2021.
^Biographical Sketches Of The Leading Men Of Chicago, written by the Best Talent of the Northwest. Chicago: Wilson & St. Clair, Publishers. 1868.
^Kohler, Sue A.; Carson, Jeffrey R.; Arts, United States Commission of Fine (1978). "Sixteenth Street Architecture". Commission of Fine Arts. p. 104. Retrieved May 9, 2020.