Eda Sterchi (1885 - )

Born in Olney, Illinois, Eda Sterchi was a landscape and genre painter who worked in the Midwest, Southwest, Europe, and Tunisia. She was a highly independent woman who was the first among her peers to cut her hair in a bob, the first to get divorced, and the first to smoke cigarettes. Her painting was influenced by European modernism, and many of them had large, abstract fields of color.