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Mary Fairchild MacMonnies (later Low)
1858–1946
BirthplaceNew Haven, Connecticut, United States of America
Death placeBronxville, New York, United States of America
BiographyDuring her expatriate career, between the mid-1880s and her return to the United States in 1910, painter and muralist Mary Fairchild MacMonnies (later Low) was one of the most successful American women artists of her generation. Mary Fairchild was born in New Haven, Connecticut, but was raised largely in St. Louis, Missouri. Inspired by her mother's work as a painter of miniatures and dissatisfied as a school-teacher, she began taking classes at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts, where she led a movement among women students to be permitted to draw models posed in the nude, an important component of artistic training then considered improper for well-bred young women. Impressed by her talent and drive, the school's director, Halsey Ives, created a scholarship that allowed Fairchild to travel to Paris for further study at the Académie Julian, a popular school among the many international artists studying in the city. By 1886, Fairchild was exhibiting her paintings in the prestigious annual exhibition known as the Paris Salon.
In 1887 Fairchild met sculptor Frederick MacMonnies, with whom she boldly shared her studio before the two could marry, following the completion of her scholarship. Exhibiting actively in the United States as well as in Paris, Mary MacMonnies won the important commission to create Primitive Woman, one of two large murals for the Woman's Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (like its companion mural, Modern Woman, by fellow American expatriate artist Mary Cassatt, it long has been unlocated). Throughout the 1890s and 1900s, she painted commissioned portraits, murals, and copies of famous works in Paris's Louvre museum. After 1890, when she and her husband joined the lively international artists' colony in the French rural village of Giverny, some ninety kilometers outside Paris, MacMonnies began absorbing its prevailing aesthetic of impressionism, the painting of modern outdoor subjects on-site, using unmixed paint in bright colors to capture natural light effects. With the births of her children, MacMonnies increasingly turned her attention to domestic scenes, which were well received by American critics.
In Giverny, the MacMonnieses' home, a converted priory with a walled garden known then as "Le Prieuré" and today as "Le Moutier," became a social center for the largely expatriate American artists' community that flourished in the years around the turn of the twentieth century. With Frederick MacMonnies's frequent absences in Paris and the United States and his several romantic involvements with female students, the couple grew increasingly estranged and divorced in 1909. Soon thereafter, Mary married her longtime admirer, the recently widowed American painter Will Hicok Low (1853–1932). Taking her daughters with her, she moved with Low to Bronxville, a suburb of New York City, where she remained for the rest of her life. Since divorce was still relatively rare in this period, she and her new husband preferred to avoid scandal by concealing her former life as Mary MacMonnies. Abandoning impressionism, Mary exhibited her increasingly conservative portraits and landscapes exclusively in the United States, her former fame largely forgotten by the time of her death at age eighty-eight.
In 1887 Fairchild met sculptor Frederick MacMonnies, with whom she boldly shared her studio before the two could marry, following the completion of her scholarship. Exhibiting actively in the United States as well as in Paris, Mary MacMonnies won the important commission to create Primitive Woman, one of two large murals for the Woman's Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (like its companion mural, Modern Woman, by fellow American expatriate artist Mary Cassatt, it long has been unlocated). Throughout the 1890s and 1900s, she painted commissioned portraits, murals, and copies of famous works in Paris's Louvre museum. After 1890, when she and her husband joined the lively international artists' colony in the French rural village of Giverny, some ninety kilometers outside Paris, MacMonnies began absorbing its prevailing aesthetic of impressionism, the painting of modern outdoor subjects on-site, using unmixed paint in bright colors to capture natural light effects. With the births of her children, MacMonnies increasingly turned her attention to domestic scenes, which were well received by American critics.
In Giverny, the MacMonnieses' home, a converted priory with a walled garden known then as "Le Prieuré" and today as "Le Moutier," became a social center for the largely expatriate American artists' community that flourished in the years around the turn of the twentieth century. With Frederick MacMonnies's frequent absences in Paris and the United States and his several romantic involvements with female students, the couple grew increasingly estranged and divorced in 1909. Soon thereafter, Mary married her longtime admirer, the recently widowed American painter Will Hicok Low (1853–1932). Taking her daughters with her, she moved with Low to Bronxville, a suburb of New York City, where she remained for the rest of her life. Since divorce was still relatively rare in this period, she and her new husband preferred to avoid scandal by concealing her former life as Mary MacMonnies. Abandoning impressionism, Mary exhibited her increasingly conservative portraits and landscapes exclusively in the United States, her former fame largely forgotten by the time of her death at age eighty-eight.