Amelia Watson, Landscape Artist
1856 - 1934
From a painting dated 1892 belonging to the Connecticut State Library, Amelia Montague Watson is documented as the first professional artist who worked in Tryon. For almost 40 years she lived and painted in the community. Her extensive travels and contacts in the art world were important in attracting many others, especially women, to the Tryon colony.
Amelia came from a family of East Windsor, Connecticut, that was well connected to the intellectual communities of Boston and Hartford. Her mother, an amateur painter, tutored her and her sister Edith. At 19 Amelia took lessons from young painter Dwight William Tryon (1849-1925) in his Hartford studio, before he went on to Europe and later to New York. Tryon achieved fame as an important Tonalist and Impressionist, and as a teacher of other successful artists. Tryon excelled at landscape and his esthetic approach was poetic; his influence on Watson’s oeuvre is palpable.
J. Foster Searles, architect
"Under the Tupelo”
Watson’s Tryon studio
circa 1915
“Minnie” Watson’s painting was already attracting favorable comment by art writers as early as 1879. From a young age she was committed to becoming a serious artist to support herself, in an era when women were often dismissed as incapable of equaling men in either technical accomplishment or creative inspiration. Connoisseurs and fellow professionals quickly recognized her fluency in watercolor; in the late 19th century watercolor became increasingly an appreciated medium for significant creative expression. She was appointed to the faculty of Temple Grove Seminary [later Skidmore School of the Arts, now Skidmore College] in Saratoga, New York, about 1878. She remained there several years while simultaneously pursuing her art. In the 1880s, she became head of the art department at Martha’s Vineyard Summer Institute, on the Massachusetts island, a position she held for two decades. Undoubtedly her work was influenced by the important 1885 exhibition of English watercolors held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Though a modest and pleasant person with a droll Yankee sense of humor, she was adept at cultivating useful contacts and profitably marketing her art. By the 1890s Watson was a well-known watercolor landscapist. She exhibited widely at commercial galleries in the Northeast and her pictures sold briskly. She was praised by critics, by influential male artists like R.M. Shurtleff, and by the likes of Broadway actor and playwright William Gillette — her most enthusiastic patron — who declared he would purchase anything she would paint for him, at any price she asked.
Gillette had built his winter cottage at Tryon, where already there was a nascent colony of writers and intellectuals. He invited Amelia to sojourn there. With her came Margaret Warner Morley, Boston author and illustrator. Their first months with widower Gillette in Tryon are recorded in Morley’s album of photographs now in Hartford’s Stowe-Day archive, and by Watson’s North Carolina watercolors that have been preserved in charming sketchbooks (now in several institutions) as well as by her individual larger paintings.
The Carolina Mountains
watercolor 14 ¾ x 11 in.
[reproduced as frontispiece in Morley’s book]
courtesy Jim & Valerie Patrina
The atmosphere proved so appealing that they decided to make Tryon their winter home. In time, as their professional successes allowed them to be away from the metropolises, they increasingly spent more time there. Both women acquired property and built residence studios. Watson’s, called “Under the Tupelo,” is a cozy stucco cottage with a whimsical roof recalling English thatching, designed by the abundantly creative Tryon architect J.F. Searles. It had a fine view of the mountains, and its pergola was hung with fragrant jasmine. In Tryon, where many people interested in fine art would come, Watson often found buyers without having to ship new paintings off to city galleries. An old newspaper article describes one event when her friends Miss Purdy and Dr. Leila Bedell exhibited her work in their home. They lined their drawing room with Watson’s views of Florida, Virginia, and Tryon and many were sold in one afternoon.
In 1895 Watson and Morley took a trip to Cape Cod. They took along Margaret’s copy of Henry David Thoreau’s book about the area and they visited sites he described. Amelia painted in the volume’s margins numerous charming impressions of the locales. In Boston they showed their friends the decorated volume with its watercolor miniatures. Word spread in creative circles, and soon the prestigious publisher Houghton Mifflin contracted to publish a new deluxe edition of Cape Cod, with lithographs reproducing Watson’s art along with the letterpress type. The color artwork was commissioned to Armstrong & Co., Boston’s leading lithographic atelier. This book proved a critical and commercial hit, yielded good royalty income, and created a national reputation for Amelia Watson.
Watson later illustrated other titles, including Morley’s 1913 The Carolina Mountains. But she chose not to pursue frequent illustration commissions, though such work was lucrative. Instead she continued to paint her own creative vision, and to build on her reputation as a serious artist. Her pictures were in shows in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Boston. She enjoyed travel and stayed in those cities with her wide network of friends. In turn she hosted them at “Under the Tupelo” and on Martha’s Vineyard. To her family home in Connecticut came authors Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Celia Thaxter, Owen Wister and Helen Hunt Jackson. Also came suffragette Katharine Houghton Hepburn (mother of Hepburn the actress) and Mary Wheelock, founder of Wheelock College. An important artist guest was Amelia’s close friend Helen Hyde (1868-1919), who introduced certain Japanese esthetics into American art, and pioneered techniques in printmaking. Watson traveled with various people from the Tryon colony to New Orleans, Florida, and other places. Even on vacations she painted, plein air whenever possible.
River Saint Lawrence, Quebec
watercolor 9 ¼ x 13 ¼ in.
Amelia also traveled with her sister Edith, who worked successfully in her field of artistic travel photography. Edith Watson (1861-1943) especially loved Canada’s people and its rugged outdoor scenery, and spent years working there. Her photographs illustrate the landmark book Romantic Canada authored by her Bermudan life companion, Victoria Hayward. Amelia’s Nova Scotia and Quebec watercolors show the period art trend away from labored documentation, toward simpler impressionistic sketches. An Amelia Watson watercolor of Quebec The Old Beauport Road is displayed in the vestibule at Lanier Library, her only original work in a Tryon public institution.
At the Grain Mill
signed l.l. by Amelia Watson, photographer
circa 1895
NC Museum of History
Like her sister, Amelia learned photography. An artfully composed romantic image depicts Southern mountain people at a gristmill near Tryon. On a trip to Nova Scotia with Edith, Margaret Morley, and Morley’s relative Frank Warner, she did photography for Morley’s book Down North and Up Along (one of only two books where her photographs were published.) Later she began collaborating with Edith in the medium of hand-colored art photographs. These photographic prints were created by Edith, while the color enhancements were executed by Amelia.
A Carolina Cabin with Hogback & Melrose Mountains
watercolor 12 ¾ x 21 ¼ in.
courtesy Richard W. Dunn
In 1929 Watson’s income plummeted. Her savings were wiped out by the Depression collapse in securities and real estate investments. Her Tryon home was her most marketable asset, which she was forced to sell in 1930. In that difficult time her cousin Grace Wilson paid for a trip to Europe, where she spent four months touring museums in Italy, France, and England. While she still summered in New England, she now wintered in Florida with Grace and her cousins, the Beaches who also had previously spent winters in Tryon. Amelia never stopped painting and exhibiting. On her way to an Orlando gallery she had a heart attack and died on the street.
“Minnie” painting plein air on Martha’s Vineyard
circa 1890
Her paintings come to light for sale regularly throughout the nation; her original Tryon watercolor for the frontispiece of The Carolina Mountains surfaced in Kentucky only weeks — fortuitously — before the 2001 exhibition Tryon Artists 1892-1942 at The Upstairs Artspace. The historical society of Martha’s Vineyard owns a large collection of her watercolors. Four of her paintings of Virginia and Florida are at Franklin Roosevelt’s library in Hyde Park, New York. Watson’s extant oeuvre is most extensive in several Connecticut institutions, among them the state library, Gillette Castle, Wood Memorial Library, South Windsor, and two early oils in the Wadsworth Atheneum at Hartford. Some of her photographs are at Smith College — where her old teacher taught art for nearly 40 years and where the art museum is named for Dwight Tryon.
Cape Cod Bay
Watercolor painting in book margin
lithographic reproduction by Armstrong & Co.
for The Riverside Press.
Cape Cod by Henry David Thoreau
Edition of 1896, Volume II
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Co.)
Michael McCue
July 18, 2023
