Our History
A physician who endowed opportunity for half a century, and the committee chair who professionalized the competition.
The benefactress
Anna Bartsch was born December 18, 1876, in Silesia. Her family emigrated to America in 1882 and settled in Burlington, Iowa; her mother, a university-trained obstetrics graduate, delivered more than 1,500 babies there. In 1898 Anna came to Washington and entered the Howard University College of Medicine — at a time when nearly every American medical school closed its doors to women, Howard opened its doors to her. She took her M.D. in 1902.
She practiced in Washington as a gynecologist for nearly half a century, kept her office on Connecticut Avenue, studied in Vienna, London, and Paris, and taught histology at Howard across three decades. Her brother, Dr. Paul Bartsch, was the Smithsonian's legendary curator of mollusks; the siblings moved through Washington's scientific and artistic circles together — including this club, where she was a member.
She never forgot what an open door was worth. In 1955 she endowed the Anna Bartsch-Dunne Scholarship Fund at Howard for women medical students — by 1971 it had carried some fifty women into medicine — and she created a second fund at the George Washington University School of Medicine. In 1961, at 84, Howard gave her its Alumni Achievement Award in Medicine. The fund that sustains this competition bears her name and continues her lifelong habit: endowing the next generation's chance.
When the Journal of the National Medical Association dedicated its March 1968 issue to her, her response was characteristic: “What have I done that you dedicate this Number to me?”
Dr. Anna Bartsch-Dunne. Portrait from the Journal of the National Medical Association, March 1968 — an issue dedicated in her honor.
The chair
Every competition needs a builder. Jane Work, a communications executive who came to Washington from New York, chaired this scholarship program and gave it its working shape — the standards, the cadence, the insistence that student artists be treated as professionals. When the Washington Post visited the club in 2011, it found her presiding over the club's convivial formality with evident delight: “I'm not the shy, retiring type.”
The first-place award of this competition is given in her memory.
The thread
A physician who spent her last dollar opening doors for students, and a chair who built the room they walk into. The scholarship you are reading about is their habit, carried forward — funded by the club, judged by working artists, and awarded in the Monroe House parlors where it has lived from the start.
