Marguerite Stuber Pearson

from Through Her Eyes - Women's Art Auction - March 30

Sarah Joncas

Note: Marguerite Pearson was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1898 and raised in Somerville, Massachusetts. After a serious bout with polio at the age of sixteen, Pearson lost her ability to walk and used a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Throughout the 1920s, Pearson studied under notable Massachusetts artists Edmund C. Tarbell and Aldro Hibbard among others, while also enrolled in classes at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She joined the Guild of Boston Artists in 1930, showing her work regularly through this organization throughout the following decades. She received much admiration for her work that remained rooted in realism and everyday life during a time of the art world pushing abstraction to its limits. Contemporary reviewers of her work note her illustrations of “perceptive tenderness” and “compelling calm.” During the 1940s, she custom-built a wheelchair accessible home studio in Rockport where she painted and taught private lessons until her death in 1978. During Pearson’s life she enjoyed a level of local acclaim, however since her death in 1978, others further afield have continued to discover the delightful simplicity of her work.

Ref.: “Marguerite Pearson Information and Inventory.” McDougall Fine Art Galleries. www.mcdougallfinearts.com. Accessed Mar. 6, 2023.

Ella Wood

Note: Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Ella Miriam Wood attended Newcomb Art School in New Orleans under the tutelage of Ellsworth and William Woodward from 1905 to 1908 where she was awarded the Fannie Estelle Holley Memorial Medal for proficiency in watercolor painting. She was a post-graduate student at Newcomb from 1910 to 1911 and listed as an instructor in watercolor for the 1912/13 school year. She later studied with William Merritt Chase in New York and attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before returning to New Orleans. Wood excelled in both oil and watercolor, and she also taught private lessons. A member of the New Orleans Arts and Crafts Club, she exhibited there over three decades and also was included in group exhibitions at the Delgado Museum of Art in 1935 and 1940. She was an active part of the New Orleans art community in the first half of the twentieth century, creating commissioned portraits, landscapes, scenes of local life and occasionally working with Mardi Gras krewes.