Representative women of New England/Mercy A. Bailey

by Mary H. Graves

MERCY A. BAILEY, art teacher, Boston, was born in the town of Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Her parents were the Rev. Stephen Bailey, a native of Portsmouth, N.H., and his wife, Mrs. Sally Whitman Bailey, daughter of Dr. Jonas and Mercy (Goodspeed) Whitman, of Barnstable. Miss Bailey's maternal grandfather, Dr. Jonas Whitman (Yale Coll., 1772), was a descendant in the fifth generation of JohnWhitman, an early settler of Weymouth, Mass., who, through his daughter Sarah, was an ancestor of President Abraham Lincoln. The Whitman-Lincoln line is thus shown: Sarah^ Whitman, daughter of John,¹ married about 1653 Abraham Jones; and their daughter, Sarah Jones, married Mordecai² Lincoln, of Hingham, from whom the line continued through Mordecai,³ born in 1686, who removed to New Jersey and later to Pennsylvania; John,⁴ who settled in Virginia; Abraham,⁵ who re- moved to Kentucky; to Thomas,⁶ father of Abraham,⁷ the sixteenth President of the United States.

Miss Bailey was educated in private schools in Boston and at Wheaton Seminary, in Norton, Mass. She remembers no time when she was not busy with pencil and brush. Even as a tiny child she thus reproduced the familiar objects about her. Her parents, recognizing her talent, wisely resolved to have it properly developed; and accordingly she received the benefit of the best instruction from both native and foreign teachers, a part of her student days being spent in London and Paris.

She had been a painstaking student for several years when she accepted her first position as a teacher of drawing in the public schools of Dorchester, Mass. W^hen Mr. Walter Smith came to Boston and started the movement for introducing the teaching of drawing in the public and evening schools of the city, there was a rapidly increasing demand for well-trained teachers. This resulted in the founding of the Normal Art School, in which Miss Bailey has been a popular and esteemed teacher for twenty years, teaching light and shade drawing from animal forms and still life in oil and water-colors. She has been a diligent worker and student in her chosen field all her life, continuing to draw and paint during the years when teaching claimed the greater part of her time. Art has held first place with her always, society, dress, vacations, becoming matters of secondary importance. She has exhibited in Boston, Philadelphia, and Western cities, her subjects being heads, animals, and landscapes. She has received medals from the Mechanics' Art Association. Among her former pupils are many of the art instructors at the Pratt Institute, the Cleveland Art School, and other important educational institutions. She was the first woman to be elected supervisor of drawing in the public schools of Massachusetts. She has lectured on art in various cities.

Miss Bailey is a regular attendant of Trinity Church, Boston, and is interested in its several charities. Perhaps her warmest sympathies are enlisted for sailors, to the homes and hospitals for whom many comforts find their way from the hands of the quiet artist in her unostentatious home at the Grundmann Studios. Miss Bailey is a member of the Copley Society of Boston and of the Industrial Art Teachers' Association. She is an apostle of thoroughness and application, and more than one professor of fine arts to-day remembers with gratitude her efficient training.