Flower Diary: In Which Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries & Opens a Door
456Flower Diary: In Which Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries & Opens a Door
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Overview
Molly Peacock uncovers the history of neglected painter Mary Hiester Reid, a trailblazing artist who refused to choose between marriage and a career.
Born into a patrician American family in the middle of the nineteenth century, Mary Hiester Reid was determined to be a painter and left behind women’s design schools to enter the art world of men. After she married fellow artist George Reid, she returned with him to his home country of Canada. There she set about creating over 300 stunning still life and landscape paintings, inhabiting a rich, if sometimes difficult, marriage, coping with a younger rival, exhibiting internationally, and becoming well-reviewed. She studied in Paris, traveled in Spain, and divided her time between Canada and the United States where she lived among America’s Arts and Crafts movement titans. She left slender written records; rather, her art became her diary and Flower Diary unfolds with an artwork for each episode of her life.
In this sumptuous and precisely researched biography, celebrated poet and biographer Molly Peacock brings Mary Hiester Reid, foremother of painters such as Georgia O’Keefe, out of the shadows, revealing a fascinating, complex woman who insisted on her right to live as a married artist, not as a tragic heroine. Peacock uses her poet’s skill to create a structurally inventive portrait of this extraordinary woman whom modernism almost swept aside, weaving threads of her own marriage with Hiester Reid’s, following the history of empathy and examining how women manage the demands of creativity and domesticity, coping with relationships, stoves, and steamships, too. How do you make room for art when you must go to the market to buy a chicken for dinner? Hiester Reid had her answers, as Peacock gloriously discovers.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781770416222 |
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Publisher: | ECW Press |
Publication date: | 09/14/2021 |
Pages: | 456 |
Sales rank: | 664,432 |
Product dimensions: | 5.70(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.30(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
She left a door ajar. Likely you don’t know her name. She slipped through a threshold she made—into the almost impossible-to-balance world of love and art. Over three hundred paintings and a lifelong commitment to a partner: she’s one of the artists from the past who made it possible to live and love in the present. Often, we who look for models of creativity learn the names of those who banged down doors and wrecked their own and others’ lives. But she, who mined a rich and unconventional interior life while clothed in discrete propriety, turned the handle more quietly. And handle is a word that belongs to this woman who made still lifes like diary pages and landscapes like dream logs. She planned and coped, sized up situations, then seized moments, managing a subtle ménage with her painter husband and their talented younger student in a stiff society, all the while making five transatlantic journeys and creating some of the most devastatingly expressive works you’ve likely never seen, signing them Mary Hiester Reid.
Table of Contents
- Prologue
- Part One: The Triangles
- Chapter One: Painter and Traveler
- Chapter Two: A Study in Greys
- Chapter Three: The Inglenook in My Studio
- Chapter Four: Silhouette
- Chapter Five: Early Spring
- Part Two: A Calling and a Romance
- Chapter Six: Nightfall
- Chapter Seven: Life Class
- Part Three: Honeymoon
- Chapter Eight: Yellow Gloves
- Chapter Nine: The Sister
- Chapter Ten: Daisies
- Chapter Eleven: Gossip
- Part Four: Paris
- Chapter Twelve: City of Flowers
- Chapter Thirteen: Paris Studio
- Chapter Fourteen: Angry Mary
- Part Five: Onteora and Roses
- Chapter Fifteen: Roses in A Vase
- Chapter Sixteen: Chrysanthemums
- Chapter Seventeen: Modern Madonna
- Chapter Eighteen: Three Roses
- Part Six: Toronto and an Arrangement
- Chapter Nineteen: Portraits
- Chapter Twenty: Evening Star
- Chapter Twenty-One: Chrysanthemums: A Japanese Arrangement
- Part Seven: Spain
- Chapter Twenty-Two: Castles in Spain
- Chapter Twenty- Three: A High Balcony, Madrid
- Chapter Twenty-Four: Sketch Portraits
- Chapter Twenty-Five: A Harmony in Grey and Yellow
- Part Eight: Arts and Crafts
- Chapter Twenty-Six: Moonrise
- Chapter Twenty-Seven: Two Portraits of Mrs. Reid
- Chapter Twenty-Eight: Lunch, Friendship and Menopause
- Chapter Twenty-Nine: Two Marys, a Miniature
- Chapter Thirty Nasturtiums, a Restoration
- Part Nine: Wychwood, Portrait of the Artist as a Tree
- Chapter Thirty-One: Morning Sunshine
- Chapter Thirty-Two: Past and Present Still Life
- Chapter Thirty-Three: Elm Tree Shadows
- Timeline
- Bibliography
- Notes
- Index
- Acknowledgements