Edith Varian Cockcroft was a Brooklyn-born painter, designer, inventor and ceramist, who exhibited at venues including the Paris Salon, National Academy of Design and Art Institute of Chicago. She was known for portraits of nudes posed against vibrant fabric backdrops as well as landscape paintings, often depicting European seacoasts. She patented and exhibited silks and velvets, produced ceramic dinnerware and designed clothing and theater sets. Her artworks were lauded for “boldness of decorative pattern and fearless use of color” and for their “character and vigor.” Among the customers for her garments were the performers Irene Castle and Jeanette MacDonald Edith typically signed her paintings and ceramics “E. Varian Cockcroft” or “Cockcroft,” and it was reported in 1920 that her works “have such a strong masculine quality that she is generally thought to be a man.” She was a member of the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts and the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors, and she was a founding member of the New York Society of Women Artists.
Biography
Her parents Robert Cockcroft and Agnes E. Cockcroft , who lived at 202 Rodney Street in Brooklyn, were part of a prosperous family descended from early Dutch and Huguenot settlers in New York. Edith trained briefly with William Merritt Chase and started exhibiting by age 21. Early in her career, she sometimes called herself Edyth or Edythe. In the early 1900s, her parents moved to their 1890s country house at 703 Franklin Turnpike in Allendale, New Jersey By 1910, Edith had traveled and painted in France and England in the company of artists, including Andrew Dasburg, Florence Lucius and W. Elmer Schofield and Murielle Schofield. Edith soon exhibited her canvases depicting Paris, Brittany and Cornwall. She meanwhile had homes in Manhattan. She married around 1914 to Charles Weyand, a mortgage broker in Allendale. Starting around 1917, the couple ran Cockcroft Studios, a clothing and accessories workshop in Manhattan at 17 East 39th Street that generated about $50,000 a year in royalties. She had established it partly out of financial necessity; Charles’s construction business had failed during World War I. Also known as Cockcroft Studio and Cockcroft Silk Co., it offered custom outfits called “personality gowns” as well as blouses, dresses, nightgowns, handbags, hats and parasols, in “illuminated fabrics” especially with batik on silk and velvet. The Prizma film company made a short color movie, “Gowns Venus Would Envy,” about her batik techniques. In the 1920s, she and Charles patented dress and blouse fabric printing techniques under Patents and . Her bestselling products were kits for making a “Cockcroft Illuminated Blouse,” which cost about $7 each; the package contained a yard or so of printed silk, with dotted outlines for cutting out the neckline, sleeves and belt. The shirts were makeable in an hour or so, even by the “rankest amateur,” according to the journalist Mildred Adams. The patterns were based on precedents such as ancient mosaics, sailors’ tattoos, kimonos, medieval tapestries, folk embroidery, Aztec reliefs and Egyptian tomb discoveries. They were marketed at department stores, including Filene’s and B. Altman and Co., as a “silk sensation” that enabled women “to look artistic without looking freakish.” Edith’s blouses were worn by the performers Irene Castle, Jeanette MacDonald and Gladys Leslie, the composer Percy Grainger’s mother Rose Grainger and the opera singer Jeanne Gordon. By the 1930s, Edith and Charles had left the garment business and moved to their country home overlooking the Ramapo River in Sloatsburg, New York. Her pottery workshop there specialized in dinnerware with metallic glazes and foliage, floral, animal and Greek deity motifs. The New York Sun called her ceramics “modern and yet somehow romantic.” In the 1950s, under the auspices of the artist DeWitt Peters, Edith introduced ceramics classes to the Centre d’Art in Haiti. She kept traveling and painting until shortly before her death, often working in watercolor, and depicting subjects including European hill towns, Haitian palm tree groves, Florida beaches and the Ramapo River’s banks. She died in Sloatsburg and is buried alongside her parents and her sister Fannie Carver and brother-in-law Wallace Carver at Valleau Cemetery in Ridgewood, New Jersey.
Her paintings at museums include Concarneau en blanc at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and at the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Two of her head-shaped vases are at Naumkeag in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. A few private collectors have published their examples of her work The Grainger Museum in Melbourne, Australia, owns two batik silk blouses and a pleated skirt made by Edith plus Rose Grainger’s receipts for the garments. Edith’s 20-page clothing catalog, “Cockcroft Studio Silks of Distinction,” is in the at University of California, Santa Barbara, and digitized in Adam Matthew’s “” database. Edith’s letters, and correspondence mentioning her, survive in archives at the Brooklyn Museum and at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art in records for the , , , Walter Elmer Schofield and . Edith’s philanthropist cousins, the sisters Mary Thurston Cockcroft and Elizabeth Varian Cockcroft, collected art and helped support Edith. The sisters’ gifts belong to the Brooklyn Museum ; Metropolitan Museum of Art ; and the American Museum of Natural History. Cockcroft family gifts of coins are at the , and their silver vessels, jewelry and textiles are at the and the .
