Women Artists

Mabel Dwight

Date: 1936

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1996.16

Text Entries: Mabel Dwight (born Mabel Jacque Williamson) lived for many years in New York's Washington Square, working for a time as an assistant to Juliana Force, director of the Whitney Studio Club. The crowded and comic variety of the city's Depression-era population at work and at play inspired her best known lithographs, whose realistic, anecdotal treatment of everyday life exemplified the tenets of the developing American Scene movement. Despite having moved to New York as a young woman to establish herself as a painter and illustrator, Dwight found that upon her marriage to etcher Eugene Higgins in 1903, "domesticity followed and for many years my career as an artist was in abeyance." It was not until 1926 that Dwight, already separated from her husband, changed her name and sailed for Paris, where she made her first lithograph at the age of fifty-two. Soon after her return, her satirical prints appeared in publications such as Vanity Fair and were exhibited widely in American galleries. Dwight saw the print as an opportunity to democratize fine art; of her newfound medium, she wrote, A humorous subject, a political satire, can be made a lasting work of art, as much as any so-called beautiful theme. Lithography, being one of the reproductive media, enables an artist to reach a large public. Whether his message is still life or bitter revolt against social injustice, he can give it to the people.