“As a Western woman, Mrs. Richardson’s work has developed under conditions of singular isolation. The old idea, encountered even today, that California is mysteriously separate from the United States, had some basis of truth. The Chinese Wall of the Rocky Mountains on the East and the Pacific on the West, did, until recently, constitute California ‘a garden enclosed’, where the artist had developed, alone and uninfluenced save by natural conditions comparable only to Spain or Italy. This art isolation is a thing of the past, but that it was not hostile to the ripening of talent the work of Mary Curtis Richardson goes to show”.

Read Mary Curtis Richardson biography in California Art Project, volume 5. CARA_V05_RICHARDSON

At a glance

Birth : April 9, 1848, in New York City (United States)
Death : November 1, 1931. San Francisco, California (United States)
Arrival in San Francisco Bay area : 1850
Married to : Thomas Richardson in 1869
Skills : Painter

Network

Art education, teachers : Art’s student league (New York), Cooper Union Art school (New-York), School of Design in San Francisco with Virgil Williams, with William Sartain in New York
Partners : Leila Curtis
Relations : Benoni Irwin, William Sartain, Virgil Williams