Hattie Saussy: The Rediscovery of an Artist

One of Georgia’s most important twentieth-century artists, Hattie Saussy, born in Savannah in 1890, began making art at an early age under the tutelage of Mrs. G. A. Wilkins and her daughter Emma Cheves Wilkins, as well as Lila Cabaniss. She attended Mary Baldwin Seminary (now Mary Baldwin College) in Virginia but left after only a year to pursue focused studies at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (now the Parsons School of Design), the National Academy of Design School (now the National Academy School), and the Art Students League in New York City. In 1913 she left for Europe, where she studied and traveled until the outbreak of World War I forced her to return home.

In 1921, after a brief stint working in Washington, D.C., and teaching at the Chatham Episcopal Institute (now Chatham Hall) in Virginia, she returned to Savannah, where she lived for the rest of her life. A force in the city’s artistic community, she was a successful painter of portraits, genre scenes, and landscapes. Her emphasis on the momentary effects of color and light identifies her as one of the South’s leading impressionists. Saussy died in Savannah in 1978 at the age of eighty-seven.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

Image:  Hattie Saussy, Girl in Red, Perry County, Alabama, 1935. Oil on board. Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia.