Frontier Women and Their Art by Mary Ellen Snodgrass

Author:Mary Ellen Snodgrass [Snodgrass, Mary Ellen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2018-05-03T16:00:00+00:00

1872

Illustrator, oil painter, watercolorist, and amateur botanist Alice Amelia Stewart Hill specialized in capturing the colors of Colorado’s stellar wildflowers—anemones, harebells, and daisies. On October 2, 1878, the Colorado Weekly Gazette reported the blossoms “have that delicate quiet beauty and grace peculiar to our mountain clime” (“Miss Stewart’s Paintings” 1878). After moving from Amboy, New York, to Colorado Springs, she befriended novelist and activist Helen Maria Fiske Hunt Jackson. At Helen’s death, in 1886, Alice issued The Procession of Flowers in Colorado, the source of illustration for a chapter in Helen’s book.

Born in 1851 to Sarah McFetridge and woolen miller and financier George Harris Stewart, Alice came of age in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. After winning awards for crayon and oil works at the Agricultural, Mechanical and Stock Association and for embroidery at the Wisconsin State Fair, she studied the style of medieval illuminators at Cooper Union in New York City and, at age twenty-three, at the National Academy of Design. Her family relocated permanently to Colorado Springs in 1873 to ease George’s asthma. To encompass Colorado’s natural beauty, she gave up portrait art and rode her horse Gypsy to Pike’s Peak, Sierra Blanca, Le Sangre de Christo, and La Veta Pass to collect specimens. She taught classes in sketching, oil, and watercolor at home and, in 1877, in Denver.

On November 26, 1886, at age thirty-five, Alice married Francis Burke Hill, a Scots pioneer, sheep rancher, and proponent of her work. For the anthology The Day and the Flower (1895), she collected 365 flower poems, including the works of Susan Coolidge, Mary Virginia Donaghe McClurg, Susan Teel Dunbar, and Helen Maria Fiske Hunt Jackson. In 1891, one of Alice’s oils, “Mentzelids and Chrysanthemums,” was a featured painting at a Denver gallery. She died of cancer at age forty-four in the Jackson Sanitarium in Dansville, New York, on January 10, 1896. The Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum and Denver Public Library display her artistry.

April

From age twenty-three, ethnologist and field photographer Matilda Coxe Evans “Tilly” Stevenson became the first female to study the religions and rituals of Great Basin peoples. She gathered facts about Ute, Arapaho, Taos, Acoma, Sia, Navajo, Tewa, Hopi, and Pueblo tribes of the cliffside ruins in New Mexico, Arizona, and California. The first of her seven treatises on the Zuñi described the construction of homes and floor, which

are kept in constant repair by the women, who mix a reddish-brown earth with water to the proper consistency, and then spread it by hand, always laying it on in semicircles. . . . The women appear to delight in this work, which they consider their special prerogative. (Stevenson 1881, 12)

Females whitened the walls with clay thinned in boiling water and applied with a goatskin glove. Other women’s skills included pottery and the weaving of belts and blankets.

Born on May 12, 1849, in San Augustine, Texas, Tilly was the daughter of Maria Coxe and attorney Alexander H. Evans. She grew up in Washington, D.C., and attended private schools in Philadelphia to study law, chemistry, and geology.

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