Swan, Lucile, -1965

Lucile Swan, painter and sculptor, was born in Sioux City, Iowa on May 10, 1890. She received her early education at Episcopal Boarding School. In 1903 the family moved to Chicago, and in 1908 she began study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Swan married artist Jerome Blum in 1912. From 1916 through 1923 she worked and travelled in Corsica, Japan, China, Tahiti and France. In 1924 she and Blum divorced. Two years later, she closed her Chicago studio and moved to New York City. In 1929 Swan accepted a commission from the Cenozoic Laboratory in Beijing. Shortly after her arrival in China she met Pierre Teilhard de Chardin at a dinner given by Dr. Amadeus Grabau. She was later to recall that the meeting changed her life. Swan and Teilhard became lifelong friends. He was a frequent teatime guest at her house in Beijing, where hours were passed in conversation regarding his philosophy. Over the years a copious correspondence was exchanged between the two friends. Among Swan's best remembered works from her time in China are the portrait bust of Teilhard de Chardin, now at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, and a reconstruction (nicknamed "Nelly" by Teilhard) of one of the skulls of Sinanthropus, the Peking man. During this period Swan also modeled many studies of prominent Chinese and Western friends. Swan's artistry is especially evident in her clay figures of children, Chinese jugglers, sword dancers and other colorful characters that caught her eye. In Aug. 1941, Swan reluctantly decided to leave China in face of the Japanese occupation and took up residence in Washington, D.C. Seven years passed before she and Teilhard met again, during his sixth visit to the U.S. in 1948. Their correspondence continued to within days of Teilhard's death in New York City, Easter Day, April 10, 1955. Lucile Swan died ten years later, also in New York, on May 2, 1965.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, paleontologist and philosopher, was born May 1, 1881, at Sarcenat, in the Dept. of Puy de Dôin, France, and educated at the College of Mongréin Villefranche-sur-Saô. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1899 at Aix-en-Provence and was ordained a priest in 1911. From 1912-1914 he studied paleontology under Marcellin Boule in Paris. After a period of teaching in Cairo, service in World War I as a stretcher-bearer, and further teaching at the Institut catholique in Paris, Teilhard began a series of visits to China. He spent the greater part of the period from 1923 to 1947 in China, Mongolia and Southeast Asia, participating in a number of geological and paleological expeditions. During this period he was involved with the discovery and research on Peking man (Sinanthropos), as well as projects on the fauna and artifacts of a number of sites where early man was found. Throughout his life, Teilhard published a large number of articles and monographs on his expeditions and research. His best known works, however, are the relatively few, later, philosophical works he wrote to synthesize his paleological research with his Christian faith. Teilhard's most important philosophical work, The Phenomenon of man, "effected a threefold synthesis--of the material and physical world with the world of mind and spirit; of the past with the future; and of variety with unity, the many with the one" (Sir Julian Huxley). Because the Church had difficulty understanding his radical synthesis of scientific evolution and theology, Teilhard was forbidden from publishing or lecturing on his philosophy from the 1940's; The Phenomenon of man was not released until after his death. Despite the ecclesiastical disapproval of his philosophy, Teilhard continued to work and to write on scientific subjects. He made a number of trips to South Africa during the 1950's, and worked for a time with the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York. He died in New York on April 10, 1955.