Eve Kahn: The Forgotten Impressionist – Mary Rogers Williams, 1857-1907

Date: 03/03/2022
Time: 5:30 pm-6:30 pm

Revolutionary artist Mary Rogers Williams (1857—1907), a baker’s daughter from Hartford, Connecticut, biked and hiked from the Arctic Circle to Naples, exhibited from Paris to Indianapolis, trained at New York’s Art Students League, chafed against art world rules that favored men, wrote thousands of pages about her travels and work, taught at Smith College for nearly two decades, but sadly ended up almost totally obscure. In 2012, arts writer Eve M. Kahn, a frequent New York Times contributor, discovered Williams’s long-forgotten artworks and thousands of pages of letters in a Connecticut boathouse. Kahn will lecture on the detective work for her book, Forever Seeing New Beauties: The Forgotten Impressionist Mary Rogers Williams, 1857-1907 (Wesleyan University Press, 2019). The virtual lecture will explore Williams’s defiance of her era’s norms and love for Connecticut scenery, during a globetrotting career painting portraits of pensive gowned women, Norwegian slopes reflected in icy waters, saw-tooth roofs on French chateaus, and incense hazes in Italian chapels.

Please register for this webinar here.

Eve M. Kahn writes regularly for The New York Times, Apollo magazine, The Magazine Antiques and Atlas Obscura. Based in Manhattan, she helps lead scholarly nonprofit groups including the Grolier Club, the Victorian Society’s New York chapter and CUNY’s Women Writing Women’s Lives.