Feb 15 2020 - May 10 2020
Manchester, NH
Maud Briggs Knowlton (1870-1956) was one of the first women to direct a major American art museum and one of the few women to paint on Monhegan Island in the late 1890s.
“A Life Made in Art” is the first major retrospective of Maud Briggs Knowlton’s work and will include more than 40 watercolors, oils, etchings, drawings, and painted porcelain from Knowlton’s time on Monhegan Island and in New Hampshire. In addition to being an accomplished artist of the Arts and Crafts era, this pioneering woman became the first director of what is now the Currier Museum of Art, which co-organized this exhibition. Accompanying the exhibition will be displays of turn-of-the-century photographs, cyanotypes, and glass-plate negatives by Knowlton’s husband, Edward, that capture life as it existed on Monhegan Island when they first arrived on its shores in the 1890s.
Knowlton started her artistic career as a china painter, as many creative women of her generation did. She traveled to New York and Boston as a young woman in order to pursue advanced training with some of the leaders in the field of art education and to learn technical skills in several crafts. By 1895, Knowlton began publicly exhibiting watercolors in prominent regional venues such as the Boston Art Club and became an active member of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts. By 1900 Knowlton began to expand her reputation in the field of china decoration to a national level, and she had five different floral patterns published in Keramic Studio magazine. [...]
On Monhegan, Knowlton was among the first women artists to paint on the island in the late 19th century. She was captivated by the island’s rustic architecture and cottage flower gardens and Monhegan became a place where she could recharge her creative spirit. Though small and remote, Monhegan attracted a rich diversity of artists, and Knowlton came to know many of them personally. She went on to include many of these artists in group exhibitions at the Currier, including George Bellows, Andrew Winter, Jay Hall Connaway, Leo Meissner, and Frederick J. Waugh.
A 92-page catalogue accompanies the exhibition.