A voluptuous Hawaiian woman, clad in a midnight blue holoku and an engulfing lei in ballet slipper pink, sits poised on the verge of erupting into a cherished mele of yore. Her downcast eyes and pursed lips suggest that she hovers within that interim silence between the audience’s diminishing murmur and the melody’s first enchanting notes. Perhaps she is taking this moment to briefly glance at the sheet music in her right hand, which simulates a conch shell in form.

By 1933, Madge Tennent was secure in the development of both her modernist approach and archetypal Hawaiian figures. While oil remained her primary medium, she felt liberated to explore others, including watercolor and gouache. Hawaiian Singer, a heavy watercolor on canvas, is the result of such explorations and thus memorializes a liminal, experimental moment in the artist’s career. Reflecting on the painting in 1958, Mrs. Tennent related it to Egyptian works she encountered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “Of purely personal interest was my discovery that my own watercolor technique […] was unknowingly patterned on the method used by the Egyptian shroud painters who used their colors both transparent and opaque and painted their portraits on linen of a coarse texture resembling the back of a modern canvas for oil paint,” (Honolulu Advertiser, 1 August 1948). She had been introduced to Egyptian art as a young girl through her parents, and thereafter came to believe that the Egyptians and Polynesians “were at one time in their anthropological history closely aligned.”

The horizontal fold located roughly at center indicates where Madge Tennent sewed in an additional strip of canvas to enlarge the pictorial space. These stitches — some better concealed than others — were to become hallmarks of her large-scale compositions in the 1930s, when she was only able to source standard-issue 3’ x 3’ canvases in Honolulu. While not an oil, Hawaiian Singer sits definitively within Mrs. Tennent’s “mature” period and elegantly typifies her signature style. She would present a lithograph of comparable subject matter in a 1942 one-woman exhibition of prints at the Honolulu Academy of Arts.

Formerly titled Hawaiian Singer in Blue, this painting was at some point acquired by John Breton Storm.* In July 1961, Storm sold it to an undisclosed Honolulu buyer for $5,250 ($46,180 adjusted for inflation), at that time “believed to [have been] the highest price ever paid for a Tennent work and probably the highest price ever paid for a painting by an Isle artist,” (Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 9 July 1961). That conjecture was likely correct. How or when Hawaiian Singer returned to Madge Tennent is unclear, though it was catalogued in a 1997 appraisal of the Tennent Art Foundation’s collection.