Mary Rogers Williams was an American tonalist and Impressionist artist known for pastel and oil portraits and landscapes. She was second in command of Smith College's art department from 1888 to 1906 under Dwight William Tryon and earned acclaim for paintings of her native New England and scenes from her wide travels in Europe, from Norway to the Paestum ruins south of Naples. She often depicted high horizons, whether in meadows or medieval hill towns, under ribbons of sky.
Biography
Mary Rogers Williams was born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, the fifth of six children of Edward Williams, a prosperous baker, and Mary Ann French Williams. Mary and her surviving sisters Lucy, Abby and Laura were all star students at Hartford Public High School, and none ever married. Mary Rogers Williams's early mentor was James Wells Champney, and she studied at the Art Students League with William Merritt Chase and at Hartford's Decorative Art Society before taking the Smith post. Her classes at Smith included drawing, painting, sculpture, art history, "study of design with practical work" and "artistic anatomy", and she wrote a catalog of the college's plaster cast sculpture collection. She occasionally visited New York, stopping by the studio of her friend Albert Pinkham Ryder. Almost every summer, she traveled in Europe, attracting crowds in villages when she sketched the scenery and locals. She sometimes walked between towns, partly because she could not afford car or carriage fees, and would set off to "catch a sketch" or "find a sketch," as she wrote to her sisters. Although she was Episcopalian, she attended Catholicchurch services in Europe and wrote lavish descriptions of the costumes and music to her sisters. She had a Hartford-made bicycle shipped overseas for traveling in the countryside. She lived in Paris in 1898–99 and 1906–07, in flats on rue Boissonade, with numerous other painters nearby.
Williams died a few days after she was diagnosed with abdominal tumors in Florence and is buried in the Allori cemetery there. Family and friends kept her paintings inventory together, and most remain in a private New England collection. Institutions that have her work include the Smith College Museum of Art, Connecticut Landmarks and the Connecticut Historical Society--the latter both own Williams' portraits of her friend and patron, the New Haven antiquarian George Dudley Seymour.
Papers
Williams' diary, photos of her and thousands of pages of her correspondence are in a private New England collection. A few letters about and from her are in the Macbeth Gallery papers at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art and the George Dudley Seymour papers at Yale and at the Connecticut Historical Society.
Note on references
Virtually all biographical information for Mary Rogers Williams comes from her archive in a private New England collection, a promised gift to Smith College, which contains diary entries, sketches, letters and clippings and other ephemera including concert programs and confetti from Paris parades. She wrote home from her frequent trips in Europe almost every day, delving into topics including her works in progress, passing scenery, treatment of women travelers, and her criticisms of ancient building restorations and of art and recent art restorations in European museums and gallery shows. The handwritten material confirms, corrects and fleshes out information published about her in publications including Art Amateur, the Macbeth Gallery's Art Notes, Boston Journal, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Buffalo Evening News, The Critic, Hartford Courant, New York Evening Post, New York Herald, New York Press, New York Sun, New York Times, New York Tribune, Smith College alumnae publications, and the Springfield Republican. An exhibition of her work with biographical material published ran from Oct. 2014 to Jan. 2015 at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut. A of her has been written by the journalist Eve M. Kahn for Wesleyan University Press.
