Mountains of the Blue Moon, 1924

​Idealized female figures in clusters of twos and threes people the fantastical mountainous landscape of Dulah Evans Krehbiel's Mountains of the Blue Moon. The broad gestures, studied poses, and vaguely classical attire of these almost faceless women hint at an undefined allegory or symbolic narrative. Casting a cool blue tone over the scene, the crescent moon is a traditional emblem of youth or adolescence. The woman's slender, flat-chested forms represent the modern women's fashion ideal of the 1920s in both body type and dress. Yet they may also indicate a state of transition from childhood to womanhood: unlike conventional embodiments of maternity, these women do not interact with the infants sharing the scene along the bottom edge of the canvas. Krehbiel conjures an imaginary world of female self-sufficiency, harmony, and transcendent beauty.

An Iowa native, Dulah Evans arrived in Chicago to study art and became a successful commercial and graphic artist. She settled in suburban Park Ridge with her husband, fellow artist Albert Krehbiel, whose professional ambitions shaped her early career. Dulah did not become a serious painter until midlife, when she began a series of paintings of idealized women in fantasy landscapes, of which this is one. Their advent coincided with a crisis in her marriage that may be reflected in her images' aspirational themes of female empowerment, spiritual transformation, and self-actualization. At the time, the Krehbiels were spending time in Southern California, a vital center for artistic experimentation in religion and philosophy as well as visual art. Dulah shared her interests in figuration and fantasy with fellow artists there and at home in Chicago.