Richardson, Constance_City of Detroit,1950.42

Constance Richardson

1905 - 2002

BiographyConstance Richardson depicted the American landscape and the cities and industrial sites of the Midwest. She grew up in Indiana and attended Vassar College for two years in the early 1920s to fulfill her parents' wish that she obtain a liberal arts education. She left college to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1925-28). There, she met Edgar P. Richardson, who became her husband and a noted historian of American art. She painted in Indianapolis from 1928 to 1930; in Detroit from 1931 to the early 1960s, while her husband was with the Detroit Institute of Arts; in Delaware in the 1960s and 1970s, when Edgar was the director of the Winterthur Museum; and then in Philadelphia for the last two decades of her life.
Although best known today for her landscapes, she also painted portraits and scenes of everyday life. Her summer travels in Vermont and New York and then later in Minnesota, the upper Mississippi River region, and Wyoming resulted in drawings and oil sketches that served as the basis for her paintings. Other frequent subjects were modern industrial sites of the Great Lakes region such as the Duluth freight yards and ore docks.
Richardson's works were included in group exhibitions nationwide in the 1930s. She had solo shows in New York-at MacBeth Gallery in the 1940s and 1950s and at Kennedy Galleries in the 1960s and 1970s. Her most notable solo museum exhibition was at the De Young Museum in San Francisco in 1947.

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