Boston Design Week: Forever Seeing New Beauties

Former New York Times ‘Antiques’ columnist Eve M. Kahn presents her book Forever Seeing New Beauties: The Forgotten Impressionist Mary Rogers Williams, 1857-1907 (Wesleyan University Press), inspired by the 2012 discovery of a trove of paintings and letters in a Connecticut boathouse.

Williams was a Connecticut baker’s daughter, bicyclist, bon vivant, intrepid European traveler, feisty resister of misogyny, and exhibitor of paintings and pastels from Paris to Indianapolis. Kahn describes how her accidental research discovery has shed light on a circle of undeservedly obscure women innovators. The emergence of Mary’s story has made many people wonder, how much other evidence of women artists’ work and words is waiting to be discovered?

Williams trained at the Art Students League and with artists including James McNeill Whistler. Starting in 1888, she ran Smith College’s art department and, in every spare moment, traveled in Europe. While biking and hiking from the Arctic Circle to Naples, she sent home witty letters detailing spectacular passing landscapes, political scandals, religious processions, befuddled Americans abroad and art world rules that favored men.
 

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