Sculptor · American
Giverny painter
Mabel Conkling
She sculpted the face of Suzanne Baudy, the daughter of the house, and showed it at the Salon of 1904.
- Dates1871 — 1966
- NationalityAmerican
- DisciplineSculptor
- Place of birthBoothbay, Maine, United States
Biography
Mabel Viola Harris was born at Boothbay, Maine, on 17 November 1871. She trained in Paris at four academies — Julian, Vitti, Carmen and Colarossi — under Bouguereau, Raphaël Collin, Luc-Olivier Merson and Frederick MacMonnies. In 1901 she married the painter David Paul Burleigh Conkling. In 1903 she showed two portrait medallions at the Girls’ Art Club in Paris; in 1904 and 1905 she was at the Salon des Artistes Français. She was president of the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors from 1926 to 1928. The National Portrait Gallery in Washington holds a bronze bas-relief by her of the actress Ethel Barrymore. She died at Boothbay Harbor, Maine, on 11 October 1966, aged ninety-four.
Giverny
Her link with the village does not run through a landscape: it runs through a face, and that face belongs to the house. Columbia University writes that she “exhibited a portrait bust of Suzanne Baudy, daughter of the proprietor of the famed Hotel Baudy in Giverny, at the 1904 Salon des artistes français”. Suzanne is the daughter of Angélina and Lucien; she appears, as a child and then as a young woman, in several photographs in our archive. That an American sculptor should have modelled her face and shown it in Paris says enough about what the house had become: no longer only an inn where one sleeps, but a circle in which one has one’s portrait made. In the same year Frederick MacMonnies — who had taught her, and who lived in the village — painted Mabel Conkling’s portrait. Her presence at Giverny itself is not directly attested; it is the work that ties her to it, and we say no more than that.
Principal works
Key points
- 1871Born — Boothbay, Maine, United States
- GivernySalon of 1904
- 1966Died
Sources
