Mary Elizabeth Price

Mary Elizabeth Price (March 1, 1877 – February 19, 1965), also known as M. Elizabeth Price, was an American Impressionist painter. She was an early member of the Philadelphia Ten, organizing several of the group's exhibitions. She steadily exhibited her works with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the National Academy of Design, and other organizations over the course of her career. She was one of the several family members who entered the field of art as artists, dealers, or framemakers.

Early life Mary Elizabeth Price was born in 1877 in Martinsburg, West Virginia. Her parents were Quakers Reuben Moore and Caroline Cooper Paxson Price who lived in Shenandoah, Virginia. Price spent her childhood in Virginia, West Virginia, and then most of her childhood in Solebury Township, north of New Hope where her mother was born. She had a sister, Alice, and three brothers, Frederick Newlin, Rueben Moore, and Carroll Price.

Education Price studied from about 1896 to 1904 at the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art and from about 1904 to 1907 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Hugh Breckenridge and Daniel Garber. She took private lessons from William Langson Lathrop.

Works Inspired by the painters from Siena and Florence during the Italian Renaissance, "Her work combines a Sienese delicacy of line with a modern freedom in the use of color," wrote a New York Times critic. Examples of such work, including Mallows (1929) and Delphinium Pattern (ca. 1933), were included in The Painterly Voice: Bucks County's Fertile Ground, a 2011 exhibition of the James A. Michener Art Museum. She also painted landscapes, genre scenes, and ships, including a unique series of Spanish treasure ships. One of her floral paintings, made of a Marsh Mallow, was appraised at $40,000 to $60,000 by Robin Starr on the PBS Antiques Roadshow in 2011.

She created murals of 18th and 19th-century needlework samplers in 1931 with Lucille Howard, who she shared a studio and was also a member of the Philadelphia Ten. The murals were made for the clubhouse of the American Woman's Association in New York at 353 West 57th Street.

Exhibitions

She exhibited her works in 1914 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and in Washington, D.C. at the Corcoran Gallery of Art Biennial. She continued to exhibit at the Pennsylvania Academy annually for most years between 1917 and 1943.

Membership As an early member of the Philadelphia Ten, a group of women artists begun in 1921, she organized exhibits and participated in solo and group shows in many galleries in New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., including Grand Central Art Galleries, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the National Academy of Design. She was also a member of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts fellowship, American Woman's Association, American Artists Professional League, the Art Alliance of Philadelphia, Allied Artists of America, Fine Arts Society of Arkansas, Phillips Mill Community Art Association, and The Plastic Club.

Price family Frederick Price, M. Elizabeth Price, Rae Bredin and Alice Price Bredin aboard ship. One of Price's brothers, Frederick,

Her sister, Alice, was an artist and brother R. Moore Price was an artist, Carroll, and his wife Edith, remained on the Solebury Township family farm. The cottage, situated along a canal, had been rented by F. Newlin for several years. M. Elizabeth Price said of it, "When I first saw the original cottage it was painted such a vivid yellow that I instinctively thought of a pumpkin; and it was so small that I named it Pumpkin Seed more in derision than anything else. But the quaintness of the name grew on us so that we've learned to love it." She grew a garden of irises, mallows, peonies, lilies, delphiniums, poppies, hollyhocks, and gladioli that she used as subjects for her paintings. She lived there for the rest of her life Price is buried in the Solebury Friends Meeting House cemetery.

Her papers are archived at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery Library.

Selected works Bathing Along the Delaware River, private collection By the Laita, Quimperle, France, by 1921 No. 1 Fuchsia, by 1929 Sabot Market, Guingamp, France, by 1921 Wine Shop, Quimperle, France, by 1921, James A Michener Museum, Doyleston, Pennsylvania The Yacht Race