Eberle worked in the midst of New York's immigrants in Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side, and immigrant children at play and women at their household chores are her primary themes. Occasionally some of her work tends to lapse into sentimentality, but at her best--as in Roller Skater--her figures exude a vitlaty and realism akin to that of the members of the "Ashcan School" with whom she had shown. The single skate worn by the young girl who propels herself with one foot and then coasts on the other is a telling detail which implies poverty and suggests that the skate was found or that a brother or sister is sharing the other skate.

Eberle was born in Webster City, Iowa, in 1878, the daughter of a doctor who constantly moved his family and his practice from town to town: from Webster City to Topeka to Kansas City to Canton, Ohio, where she graduated from high school. She studied sculpture first in Canton at the local YMCA and then at the Art Students league in New York. Active as an advocate of suffrage for women, Eberle worked in New York during most of her career. She exhibited widely, including the Venice Biennale and the famous Armory Show, among many others. Illness forced her to curtail her work severely, and in 1931 she moved to Westport, Connecticut, where she became more involved with portrait commissions. She died in New York in 1942.

Source: Bulletin, November-December, 1982.