Right now, if you just started ticking them off, how many artists do you think you could name, just off the top of your head? Does it seem like a little or a lot? I usually think I’d do OK at it until I come across a list of artists I’ve never heard of. Often, it’s a museum exhibit that sets me straight; that shows me how little I really know. Right now, through the end of September, there’s a show at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens up in Memphis that has that exact effect. Entitled “Susan Watkins and the Women Artists of the Progressive Era,” it takes as its starting point a painter named Susan Watkins but then spreads outward to bring to your attention many, many more.
The exhibit is organized by the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia. Its purpose, says the Gallery, is to examine “how women at the turn of the twentieth century overcame barriers and achieved success within the professional art world” and, more interestingly I think, how they “forged their professional identities.” Reading about it made me pause to think how many women artists I know from that era. And I could think of only two.
Susan Watkins was born in 1875 in Lake County, California. Her father was a prominent California newspaperman. When she was 15, the family moved to New York City when her dad got a job writing editorials for the New York Sun. In the early and mid-1890s she studied at the Arts Students League under William Merritt Chase. Chase later said she was "the best woman painter alive,” an assessment whose shortcomings we can certainly hear if he couldn’t. After her father’s death in 1896, she and her mother moved to Paris where she continued to study painting.
During her lifetime her paintings were shown the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery in DC, the San Francisco Art Institute, and many other museums. She won awards from the Society of French Artists, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904, the National Academy of Design in New York, and the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh.
“Money, social honors, a brilliant marriage are all very well,” Watkins said in an interview with the New York Times in 1910, “but to work out things with one’s hands and brains gives the most lasting and most perfect happiness.”
She got married two years later in 1912, after which time she lived in Norfolk, Virginia. She died the next summer at age 38. When her husband died in 1946, he left over 60 of her paintings to the Chrysler.
If you can swing a trip to Memphis, I recommend you go see this. You’ll come away glad that you know these artists.