Portrait of Mary Colman Wheeler — Period photograph, before 1900: the artist as a young woman, seated, in a dark dress with lace collar and cuffs. Wheeler School collection, Providence.

Painter · American

Giverny painter

Mary Colman Wheeler

She rented the Hameau and brought her pupils there: the late Giverny colony was also a girls’ art school.

Dates1846 — 1920
NationalityAmerican
DisciplinePainter
Place of birthConcord, Massachusetts, United States

Biography

Born at Concord, Massachusetts, in 1846, into a progressive and abolitionist milieu, Mary Colman Wheeler first taught mathematics and Latin. In 1882 she founded an art school for young women at Providence, and from 1887 ran summer painting courses in France. She died in 1920.

Giverny

Between 1907 and 1912 she rented the Hameau at Giverny and played an important part in the village’s artistic colony, seeing Claude Monet and the Butler family. The Hameau is the house also rented by Lilla Cabot Perry and Frederick Carl Frieseke.

Principal works

Thé au jardin — Thé au jardin oil on canvas, 1910, 84 × 74 cm. A young woman in a blue dress, under an orange parasol, at a table laid in the garden: white teapot, lemon, fruit stand, flowering beds behind her. Musée des impressionnismes Giverny, inv. MDIG 2023.4.1, given in 2023 by the children of Richard Warren Wheeler and Betty Ann Owens Wheeler, through Robert Martin and the Wheeler School.

Key points

1846Born — Concord, Massachusetts, United States
Giverny1907 — 1912, tenant of the Hameau
1920Died

Sources

Around them

Related artists

Portrait of Claude Monet

Discover Claude Monet 1840 — 1926 French · Painter His arrival in Giverny is the most frequently cited starting point of the village’s reputation.

Portrait of Lilla Cabot Perry

Discover Lilla Cabot Perry 1848 — 1933 American · Painter She stayed regularly in Giverny between 1889 and 1909 and made Impressionism known in America.

Portrait of Frederick Carl Frieseke

Discover Frederick Carl Frieseke 1874 — 1939 American · Painter Settled lastingly in Giverny, he painted women in gardens and light filtered through foliage.

Portrait of Theodore Earl Butler

Discover Theodore Earl Butler 1861 — 1936 American · Painter A lodger at the Hôtel Baudy in 1888, he became Monet’s son-in-law and the only member of the colony to die in Giverny.

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