Thomas Hoerber

Ready and Waiting, Original Painting

2024

Victorian Landscape Watercolour of a Venice Street Market scene very much in the style of Turner Anyone who is a fan of Hercules Brabazon Brabazon will love this painting! Venice ...

A watercolor depicting a mountain view and the lake Gruyère, (Lac De La Gruyère) in Switzerland by the American Impressionist and Tonalist Mary Rogers Williams (1857–1907). Signed M.R. Williams. On the verso, the artist wrote: ‘Painted in Gruyère July 1902.’ This is a newly discovered work by a rare woman artist who seldom appears on the art market. Small in scale, yet rich in atmosphere, power, and depth—a genuine little gem. Mary Rogers Williams was born in 1857, in Hartford, Connecticut, the fifth of six children to a local baker. Orphaned by the age of fourteen, she pursued art with remarkable determination, studying at Hartford’s Decorative Art Society and the Art Students League in New York under William Merritt Chase. Her early mentor was James Wells Champney. In 1888, she joined Smith College as associate professor of art, where she taught for nearly twenty years to help support her family. Alongside her academic career, she maintained a serious and evolving artistic practice, though much of it was pursued within the limitations of her era’s gender roles and financial pressures. Her work is often classified as a blend of Tonalism and Impressionism—movements that were just taking shape during her lifetime. Tonalists used subdued palettes to evoke mood rather than detail, while Impressionists leaned toward brighter colors and broader subjects. Williams, working independently of art-world factions, forged a style rooted in mood, light, and atmosphere. She painted luminous pastels, watercolors, and oils—portraits, landscapes, and intimate studies of daily life. Despite knowing figures like Whistler, William Merritt Chase, and Childe Hassam, she rarely aligned herself with any artistic “school” and found many male contemporaries pretentious or repetitive. She famously dropped out of Whistler’s Paris school, calling him “a pompous fop surrounded by fawners.” Though Mary Cassatt and Williams were both American Impressionists living in Paris, they never met—Cassatt enjoyed wealth and elite circles, while Williams was a self-reliant educator without patrons. Williams traveled extensively throughout Europe—from the Arctic Circle to the ruins south of Naples—often alone or with her sister. She bicycled through fjords, hiked to medieval towns, and visited chateaux and harbors, all while sketching prolifically. She is likely the only 19th-century woman artist whose travels and daily life can be traced in such vivid, personal detail: what she ate, how she felt about fellow travelers, what she paid for trams, how the air smelled, what she wore, and how she missed home. She documented everything—museum visits, church restorations, conversations with hotel guests, and her frustrations with men’s treatment of women artists. These letters, rediscovered in 2012 in a family boathouse, provide an extraordinary insight into not only her art but the intellectual and emotional texture of her life. Her writings reveal not only artistic insight but the immense workload she carried. At Smith, she taught studio art and art history, organized faculty events, curated student exhibitions, wrote essays, handled housework, and even cooked and cleaned for her own lodgings. On vacations, she cooked for her family; in Europe, she waxed floors, painted walls, repaired clothing, and stoked fires—all while maintaining her painting and travel schedule. Unlike many of her male peers, she had no assistants, no household staff, and little inherited wealth. Yet, as her letters reveal, she never saw herself as a victim—she relished challenges and even the absurdities of her era, from Italian waiters pushing marriage to department heads at Smith dismissing women’s artistic capacity. Despite these challenges, Williams exhibited widely during her lifetime: Paris Salon (1899) National Academy of Design (1903–04) Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts New York Water Color Club, American Water Color Society, Art Association of Indianapolis, and more. She was praised in The New York Times, Hartford Courant, and Springfield Republican, and compared by peers to figures like Emily Dickinson—another New England woman of quiet yet profound artistic power. But unlike Dickinson, Mary Williams...