Mary Hallock Foote

Mary Hallock Foote was best known as a skilled observer of the frontier and an accomplished writer. She was born in New York to a Quaker family, first educated at a private school created by her father, then Poughkeepsie Seminary and finally studied at the Cooper Institute of Design for Women.

She befriended fellow artists Helena de Kay Gilder while at the Cooper Institute and the two remained lifelong friends. Gilder was a close friend of Winslow Homer. Her husband was a poet and managing editor of Scribner's monthly, who published Foote's work.

Foote married a mining engineer in 1876 and had 3 children. She spent her life traveling cross-country to mining communities in California, Colorado, and Idaho, drawing and writing about the different poeple she encountered there.

Foote was also a correspondent for The Century Magazine and her work was displayed in the Women's Buidling, 1893 World's Columbian Expo, and in the 1913 Armory Show.

Wallace Stegner's "Angle of Repose" (1917 was based on Foote's life. Her memoir, "A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West," was published in 1972 and brought renewed interest in her work.

-Cynthia Cormier, Director of Education

April 2020