WOMAN IN ART
imaginative child. Every day life for her was thrilling. She savored it to the full, and grew up, as most young people do, with no ambition except to enjoy herself.
Her mother, however, was a woman of ideas far in advance of her time. She believed that girls as well as boys should be trained to a profession and become self-supporting. Her father had been a copper-plate engraver. Naturally her mind reverted to this.
As soon as her daughters' education was finished she again made the long, hazardous voyage with them back to New York, the city of their birth, and entered them as pupils in the school of art at Cooper Union. Great was the fame of Cooper Union! Two girls had traveled all the way from California to study drawing there. In 1866 it was an unheard of thing. Peter Cooper himself heard of it and was pleased and astonished. But greater was the wonder in San Francisco when they returned after a two-years' absence, full-fledged wood engravers, and set up shop in the carriage house of their father's home. Mary, the younger, barely twenty, was the draftsman, Leila the block cutter. They had plenty of orders. One of their earliest, the cover for the Southern Pacific Railroad booklet, was in use until recently.
The fact that in a year or two both married, in no way interfered with their business activities. They flourished, took in a junior partner, and took a downtown office.
In spare hours Mary did a little sketching from life to amuse herself. These sketches came under the eye of Benoni Irwin, the portrait painter, who had married her younger sister. On his advice, and somewhat against her conscience, she spent a year in New York, studying first at the Art Students' League, then in a small private class under the criticism of William Sartain. During that winter the famous painting, "Milton Dictating Paradise Lost," was exhibited in New York. It was the first really notable work by a colorist that she had ever seen. Up to this time she had worked in black and white, but now she realized the possibilities of color as a medium. She went home to resign from the office, letting the junior partner take her place, and again the loft of the carriage house—this time her own and her husband's—was fitted up as a studio.
She had no children to absorb any of the force of her emotional life. Her husband sympathized with her ambitions. Her sister and brother-in-law were encouraging. She spent another winter in New York with them, not in any class, but working in Mr. Irwin's studio, profiting by his criticisms and by conversations of other painters who dropped in at the end of the day to smoke
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