Violet Dandridge

Violet Dandridge was the pseudonym for Serena Katherine Dandridge (1878–1956), an American scientific illustrator, painter, naturalist, and suffragist. She was the Smithsonian Institution’s first female scientific illustrator. Some sources state she was born at The Bower, the Dandridge family home on the Opequon River near Bower, West Virginia. Her parents were Adam Stephen Dandridge and poet Caroline Dane "Danske" Bedinger Dandridge; she was the eldest of three siblings which included Stephen Hawks and Dorothea Spotswood.

In 1896, at the age of 18, she moved to Washington, D.C., to study fine art.

In 1914, she was committed by her parents to Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, a psychiatric hospital for “nervousness”. In 1939, she exhibited her painting, "Le Chene Seigneurial", of an oak tree at the Salon des Artistes Français in Paris. Dandridge died on November 7, 1956, after one of her many trips returning to Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital for treatment. She is buried in Elmwood Cemetery in Shepherdstown.

Duke University Libraries and Shepherd University have her archive and papers. In 2016, Shepherd University's Scarborough Library had an exhibition of her sketches and drawings.