Rago Auctions

American Impressionist painter Mary Elizabeth Price played a key role in the New Hope School of painting in the early 20th century and enjoyed a long career marked by critical and commercial success. Born into a Quaker family in Martinsburg, West Virginia in 1877, Price moved to the ancestral farm in Solebury, Pennsylvania when she was a child. Her artistic education began around 1896 at the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art and continued at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under the tutelage of renowned artists Hugh Breckenridge and Daniel Garber. Price also received private lessons from William Langson Lathrop. She became an early member of The Philadelphia Ten, a pioneering and influential group of female artists.

By the late 1920s, Price settled permanently in the New Hope, Pennsylvania area, purchasing a small cottage she had been renting and dubbing it Pumpkin Seed because of its small size and vivid yellow color. She would remain there for the rest of her life. Price was influenced greatly by local New Hope Impressionist painters and developed her own reputation producing floral still life paintings, distinguished by their use of gold and silver leaf. Inspired by Italian Renaissance painters from Siena and Florence, her special technique involved applying red clay, gesso, metal leaf, and oil paints to wooden panels. Her work was marked by a delicate Sienese line and a modern freedom in the use of color. Price's oeuvre extended beyond floral compositions, encompassing landscapes, genre scenes, and even a distinctive series depicting Spanish treasure ships.

Beginning in the 1910s and throughout the remainder of her career, Price exhibited constantly. In 1914, she exhibited at the Corcoran Biennial in Washington, DC, for the first of seven times. That same year also marked her first exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy in Philadelphia, where she showed for more than twenty years. She also exhibited her work at the National Academy of Design in New York City sixteen times between 1921 and 1943, and with The Philadelphia Ten from 1921 until 1945. Price held countless solo exhibitions in New York as well and she won the 1927 Carnegie Prize for best oil painting by an American artist. In addition to her artistic endeavors, she was chairman of exhibits for the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors from 1920 through 1927 and one of the founders of the Phillips Mill Art Association in New Hope.

Price died in 1965 at the age of eighty-seven, leaving behind an important legacy of advocacy for women’s art and education. Her work can be found today in the permanent collections of Swarthmore, Smith, and Dickinson Colleges, as well as the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, west of New Hope.