Edith Dale Monson
1875 - 1977
(A Hartford Biography)
© Gary W. Knoble, 2014
Although Edith Dale Monson was born in New Haven and lived there off and on until she was 45, her Hartford roots were deep. She was a direct descendent of one of the founders of Hartford and in 1920 she moved there and lived there until her death, 57 years later. As a student of Robert Henri at the Art Students League and a classmate of many of the “Ashcan School” painters, her artistic views were considerably more progressive than those of many of her contemporary Hartford painters, but she was an active participant in the Hartford art scene from the 1920’s on.
Monson was born August 26, 1875 in New Haven, Connecticut. Her father was Charles Clayton Monson and her mother was Stella Elizabeth Shepherd. Through her father, she was a direct descendent of Ozias Goodwin, one of the first settlers of Hartford who arrived there in 1635 with Thomas Hooker.
She began her schooling in New Haven and was a graduate of Smith College in the class of 1900, which she referred to as the class of aughty-aught. She returned to New Haven after graduating from Smith and taught school there for two years.
In 1902 she moved to New York to study with Robert Henri at the Art Student’s League where she remained for two years. Among her classmates were Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, Stuart Davis, and George Bellows.
She returned to New Haven in 1904. The 1906 Smith catalogue shows she was living at 1 Hillhouse Avenue in New Haven. By 1917 she was living at 156 Grove Street.
She was active in progressive political causes including the fight for women’s sufferage and supported unions and fair labor practices.
In 1920 she moved to Harford to take care of her ailing mother. They lived at 9 Willard Street in a building that is still standing (2014) and she established a studio on Asylum Street in downtown Hartford near Old Bank Lane where she painted and gave art lessons.
In 1927 or 1928 she participated in the founding of the Hartford Society of Women Painters and held various positions in that organization including Treasurer in 1934 and Secretary in 1935. In 1943 she was still a member of the governing council. Other prominent Hartford woman painters who were active in the Society included Edith Briscoe Stevens, Frances Hudson Storrs, Maude Monnier, Mabel English, and Katherine Seymour Day. She regularly participated in the annual shows of the Society. During this time, her name appeared frequently in the Hartford Courant. In a review of the third annual show of the Society held in February 1931 at the Wadsworth Atheneum, she was singled out for mention. “Mrs.(sic) Dale Monson does a pleasing study of shadows on snow in ‘Winter’s End’, a picture of trees in a snowbank. She also has to her credit, a portrait, ‘Lizzie’, and a sketch.” In April of 1931 she participated in a show at the Town and Country Club. Also included in that show were many of the Hartford painters active at the time including “Chick” Austin, the progressive and controversial young director of the Wadsworth Atheneum; her friends from the Hartford Society of Women Painters Day, English, Monnier, Storrs, and Sarah Talcott; Russell Cheney, Harold Green, William Bradford Green, Sanford Low, (who was later the director of the New Britain Museum of American Art), James McManus, Carl Ringius, and Paul Saling. In December of 1931, the Town and Country Club hosted the Fourth annual show of the Hartford Society of Women Painters. Participating, along with Monson, were English, Day, and Stevens among others.
She won the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts Charles Noel Flagg prize for a charcoal drawing of flowers.
During the 1930’s she was a WPA artist. Some of her WPA paintings were included in a 1938 show at the Weaver High School where librarians of local institutions where encouraged to select paintings to hang in their various institutions.
Her artistic views were as progressive as her political and social views. As a Henri student, she often painted scenes from everyday life in the “Ashcan School” manner. There are at least three of her paintings still extant that actually feature ashcans. There is an interesting entry in James Britton’s diaries that gives a hint of her artistic views, which appear to have been more in line with those of the “modernists” favored by Austin, than the more conservative views of Flagg, McManus, James Britton, and the other Hartford landscape painters of the time. No fan of her teacher Henri, Britton, who did not know her personally, writes in his diaries of a visit of his friend Reverend McNeill, an amateur painter. (McNeill) “Speaks of a Miss or Mrs. Dale Monson in Hartford, a pupil of Henri’s who attended a modernistic art lecture at the Museum (the Atheneum) and professed to like it. McN met McManus there who expressed the opposite view of it.” (April 7, 1933)
In 1935 she was teaching art at the Federal Community College in Hartford.
During 1941, she is twice mentioned in the Hartford Courant in connection with shows of local art at the G Fox and Ward Company stores. In the G Fox show she was joined by her fellow Woman’s Society members Day and Storrs, as well as Edward Dugmore, Albertus Jones, Irving Katzenstein and others.
According an unpublished biographical sketch written by members of her family, in her early period she worked mainly in pastels and in her later period in oils. During her life she often painted local scenes, which included the garbage cans in her backyard as well as local scenic spots such as the Heublein Tower on Talcott Mountain. She also painted in New York City, Bermuda, Rockport, and Monhegan Island, Maine. She painted many portraits of family members and acquaintances. One of her favorite subjects was flowers. The family notes that she often did not consider her paintings finished. ”In as much as Edith was a ‘perfectionist‘, she had many works which she considered unfinished and thus did not sell a great many of her pictures.” Fortunately her family preserved most of her works, many of which were featured in a 2006-2007 exhibition at the Mortenson Library at the University of Hartford.
She was proficient in French. Her nephew Shepherd Holcombe recalled that as she was trying to teach her nephews French, they were instructed to call her “Tante E”.
She never married.
During her time in Hartford she lived at various addresses. In addition to 9 Willard Street, she lived at 887 Asylum Avenue, 2 Atwood Street. (from the 1940’s to the 1950’s), 749 Farmington Avenue, West Hartford, and finally at 48 Ledyard Road, West Hartford (from age 97 until she died).
Monson died on October 2, 1977 at the age of 102, at her Home on Ledyard Street. She is buried in the Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven.
Even though she sold few of her works, some of them did find their way into the collections of several local institutions. “Flowering Tree” is in the collection of St. Joseph’s University, (probably purchased by the collector Father Andres Kelly). “Flowers” 1937, is in the Collection of UCONN. At least one of her WPA paintings is in the Windham County Extension Center, Brooklyn, CT. “Mountain Laurels”, is in collection of the New Britain Museum of American Art.
The Hartford Courant Archives, 2/15/1931, 4/4/1931, 12/11/31, 1/11/1935, 2/10/1935, 10/10/1935, 11/9/1938, 10/31/1941, 11/16/1941, 12/1/1943
Britton, James, “Diaries, in James Britton Papers”, Smithsonian Archives of American Art,
Holcombe, Shepherd Sr., unpublished short biography
Lechner, George, University of Hartford, Special Collection, Edith Dale Monson, 2006
Mattatuck Historical Society, Mattatuck Museum.org
Smith College, Catalogue of Officers, Graduates, and nongraduates, 1875-1905, 1906, 1917
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