This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Laura Wasson Maxwell was born in Carson City, NV on Oct. 13, 1877. Laura Wasson developed artistically when quite young. She was self-taught until her first lessons from watercolorist Sydney Yard in San Francisco and Carmel (1906).
Early in life she married Wm Maxwell. She later studied at the Bancroft School in NYC and the Boston School of Design. After her return to Carmel in 1918, she exhibited with other local artists at the old Arts & Crafts Hall. Mrs. Maxwell was a founder of the Carmel Art Ass'n and remained a resident of Carmel until her death on Aug. 7, 1967. Her oils and watercolors include floral still lifes, marines and landscapes of the Monterey Peninsula.
Exh: Santa Cruz Art League, 1938; Society for Sanity in Art, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, 1945; Calif. State Fair, 1947 (award). | Source:
Edan Hughes, "Artists in California, 1786-1940"
Women Artists of the American West; Yesterday's Arists of the Monterey Peninsula; Monterey: The Artist's View,1925-1945; Artists of the American West (Doris Dawdy); Monterey Peninsula Herald, 8-8-1967 (obit).
| | Nearly 20,000 biographies can be found in Artists in California 1786-1940 by Edan Hughes and is available for sale ($150). For a full book description and order information please click here. |
Biography from American Eagle Fine Art:
| Laura Wesson Maxwell was born October 13, 1877, in Carson City, Nevada, of a pioneering family. She spent her early years in San Francisco, where she studied with Sidney Yard, a watercolorist.
In Carmel, the artists' colony was just about to begin. Jane Gallatin Powers established the first artist's studio in 1903; Jessie Short, also a student of Yard's, built her studio the same year. In 1904 Yard moved to Carmel and in 1906, before the earthquake, Laura Maxwell moved, establishing her studio at Carmelo and Santa Lucia, and continued to study with Yard.
She did not, however, remain here continuously, but studied in New York at the Peters-Bancroft School and at the Boston School of Design. Maxwell spent summers sketching in America and Europe and studied for four years at l'Académie Julien in Paris, where Monterey Peninsula artists Francis McComas and Charles Rollo Peters also studied.
She traveled in Asia, Italy, France, the Balkans, Mexico and on a mule in Dalmatia. It was her habit to travel about alone in a period when it was improper for a lady to travel without a female companion. She was on her own when she traveled through the remote parts of Mexico. In Paris she took the bus alone, and got off whenever she saw something interesting; in one instance, not knowing who they were, she got off into a mob of angry Communists.
She said of her adventures: "Every experience in life--pleasant or disagreeable--helps you," and felt that fear was the most dangerous curb to expression. "It is too easy to close one's life up into a book of fear."
Although she continued to travel throughout her life, she returned to Carmel in 1918 with her husband, Capt. William Lindsay Maxwell, USN, and began showing at the old Arts and Crafts Hall. When the Arts and Crafts Club became the Carmel Art Association, she helped to raise funds to purchase the site and the original building for the Association and helped physically to build the Carmel Art Association Gallery.
Laura Maxwell painted both in oils and watercolors, but came to prefer watercolor. She was a plein-air painter, preferring to work on site, but she found carrying a thirty-pound oil kit onerous. She began to paint watercolors and found that she liked their purity of color and freshness. She used very large brushes and "slathers of paint," inappropriate for watercolors traditionally.
Oils are traditionally associated with men because of their boldness, vigor, and are deemed more important than watercolors, which are lighter in color and form and are suited to the delicate nature of ladies, who, tradition says, modestly prefer a second ranking. Laura Maxwell did not conform to this notion of the ladylike watercolorist at all, while, interestingly, her teacher, Sydney Yard, did. Her watercolors of flowers are powerful in form, vibrant in color--bright orange, blue, green and red--and voluptuous in their depiction.
Maxwell had an international reputation. She exhibited at the Santa Cruz Art League, the Legion of Honor, the DeYoung Museum, Gump's and in Paris and Peking and had one-woman shows here at the Leaky Gallery and the Carmel Art Association. In 1947 she won the first prize for outstanding watercolor at the California State Fair, and in 1949, the second place award for watercolor by the Society of Western Artists. She is listed in Women Artists of the American West.
Laura Maxwell is a pioneer because she was an iconoclast of conventional forms, both in her life and in her art. She died at the Fort Ord Hospital in August, 1967, at age ninety. One of her oil paintings is on view in council chambers at Carmel City Hall. Some of her watercolors are reproduced in the Carmel Art Association's "Six Early Women Artists".
Source: "Six Early Women Artists: A Diversity of Style", Carmel Art Assn. 1991, page, 51. |
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