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Margaret J. Patterson: Master of Color and Light
October 3 - November 12, 2006
During World War I, when Americans couldn't travel to Europe, Boston artist/schoolteacher Margaret J. Patterson (1867-1950) spent some summers on Cape Cod. She gravitated to the area between Chatham and Truro, rather than the artists' colony of Provincetown, and produced an impressive body of work inspired by meandering inlets, windblown trees, and rolling moors and dunes.
Now, for the first time, there has been an exhibition on the Cape devoted solely to her work: "Margaret J. Patterson: Master of Color and Light" at the Cahoon Museum of American Art. Viewers had the opportunity to rediscover an artist acclaimed during the first half of the 20th century for her glorious use of color and exquisite sense of design. Featuring more than 50 works, the show covered all periods of Patterson's career, but give special attention to scenes of Cape Cod.
Patterson's contemporaries recognized her talent as a painter in oils, watercolors and gouache and considered her a pioneer in color woodblock printmaking here in this country. She enjoyed regular exhibitions and glowing reviews in her hometown of Boston and also participated in shows in New York, Philadelphia, Providence, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and several major European cities. At the time she died in 1950, her work was in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where she was one of the first women to be represented.
The daughter of a Maine sea captain, Patterson was born on the island of Java during a voyage and sailed around the world as a girl. As an adult, she retained her taste for going abroad. And because she worked as a teacher -- she was head of the art department at Dana Hall prep school in Wellesley for many years -- she had her summers free to travel. With the exception of the wars years, she generally sailed for Europe.
Initially, Patterson's travels took her to northern Europe, including Holland, Belgium, France and Germany. But by 1909, she'd discovered Spain and Boston art critics discovered just what an exciting colorist she could be. One reviewer raved: "There can be no doubt that the painter had a good time in Spain; almost every picture speaks of the gusto with which she painted these highly colored and wonderfully picturesque places."
After World War I, Patterson most frequently spent her summers in Italy, where she painted -- among other things -- yellow-green cypress trees twisting upward against a purple mountainside and an ancient pergola with rafters and vines that cast crisscrossing violet shadows over creamy stone columns. "Her work now assumes somewhat the aspect of ultra-modernism," a reviewer wrote in 1926.
Starting with a water lily on a pond, floral subjects began appearing in Patterson's work around 1920. Color woodblock prints of roses, daisies, zinnias, marigolds, poppies, pansies, hollyhocks, anemones, petunias and mixed bouquets brought out the very best in her skills as a colorist and designer. Sometimes, she went for simplicity, as in "The White Rose," where a single flower in a stem vase divides a solidly colored background into three elegant segments of negative space. At other times, her arrangements are amazingly complex. In "Bleeding Heart," we can note each blossom's particular charm, but are most enchanted by the overall impression.
Patterson's paintings and color woodblock prints resemble each other. In her paintings, the artist tended to flatten spatial relationships and omit transitional tones. In making her prints, Patterson achieved tonal subtleties that would make many painters proud. Amazingly, she also managed to convey the impression of freedom and spontaneity in an art form that's hard, rigid and demands precision.
Patterson was largely forgotten until art dealer James R. Bakker presented two retrospectives of her work at his Cambridge gallery in the late 1980s. Bakker, who's now based in Provincetown, gave the museum invaluable guidance in curating "Margaret J. Patterson: Master of Color and Design" and has generously funded a checklist of works in the exhibition.
Also in conjunction with this show, the national magazine American Art Review published an eight-page article on Patterson by the museum's director/curator, Cindy Nickerson. Ms. Nickerson's article is presented below.
Margaret Patterson: Master of Color and Design
by Cindy Nickerson
Margaret Jordan Patterson's glorious use of color and exquisite sense of design are the cornerstones of the landscapes and floral still lifes she produced during the first half of the 20th century. Whether an oil, watercolor, gouache or woodblock print, in virtually all of her pieces there is something that delights the eye -- something only incidentally related to the subject. Maybe it's some striking harmony between the colors, or some intriguing pattern created by lines and spaces. Usually, it's both -- color and design working together to make fairly ordinary subjects altogether extraordinary.
As they sometimes say of married couples, her paintings and color woodblock prints grew to resemble each other -- partly because the former were often studies for the latter, but also because Patterson's vision was so consistent. In her paintings, Patterson tended to flatten spatial relationships and omit transitional tones. Her shadows -- often blue or violet, never a grayish hue -- become simple, but significant forms in themselves. In making her prints, Patterson achieve tonal subtleties that would make many painters proud. Amazingly, she also managed to convey the impression of freedom and spontaneity in an art form that's hard, rigid and demands precision.
Patterson has been best remembered as a pioneer in color woodblock printmaking -- when she's been remembered at all. But her contemporaries admired all of her work. Throughout the 1910s and '20s -- and probably later -- she enjoyed regular exhibitions and glowing reviews in her hometown of Boston, where she showed at the Copley Gallery, Doll & Richards, Grace Horne, Boston Art Club and the Guild of Boston Artists. Over the course of her career, she also took part in exhibitions in New York, Philadelphia, Providence, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, London, Florence, Rome, Stockholm and Paris.
Her works kept good company. In 1924 and '25, she participated in the 35th and 36th exhibitions of the Boston Society of Water Color Painters at Boston Art Club, along with such artists as Charles Curtis Allen, Frank W. Benson, Louis Kronberg, Charles Hovey Pepper, Harry Spiers, John Whorf and Charles Woodbury. In 1933, she took part in the American Color Prints exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. It was a large show, bringing together etchings, woodcuts and lithographs by 78 well-known artists, including John Taylor Arms, Gustave Baumann, Arthur B. Davies, Ada Gilmore, Rockwell Kent, Karl Knaths, Blanche Lazzell, Tod Lindenmuth, Abraham Walkowitz and Max Weber.
At the time Patterson died in 1950, her work was in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (where she was one of the first women to be represented), the Smithsonian Institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the South Kensington Museum in London and the Museum of Fine Art in Genoa, Italy.
Patterson was largely forgotten until retrospectives at Steven Thomas Fine Paintings and Prints in Woodstock, Vt., and James R. Bakker Antiques, Inc., in Cambridge, Mass., rekindled interest in her in the late 1980s. Feay Shellman Coleman, who wrote the essay for the Bakker exhibition catalogue, did an exceptional job of organizing and interpreting the raw materials of Patterson's life.[1] But although there's a fairly good record of Patterson's exhibition history, personal biographical material is, at this point, somewhat skimpy. One source of colorful anecdotal information is an unpublished manuscript, written by Boston writer Howard Leavitt Horton in 1946, when Patterson was close to 80.[2] He interviewed her on several occasions at her small attic studio at Trinity Court on Dartmouth Street, where she had lived for 20 years, and she did give her approval for him to publish what he wrote.
Oddly enough, one part of Patterson's life that's well-documented is the first several months. Her parents, Alfred Patterson of Saco, Maine, and Sarah Frances Jordan of nearby Portland were married in 1864. Their fathers were sea captains, and Alfred, too, had taken up the seafaring life. Once, he brought back a live alligator as a gift for the Saco Museum, but he normally sailed with passengers or such cargo as grains, salt, coal or guano. In 1867, Sarah was at sea with him when she went into labor. They stopped at the Indonesian island of Java, where Margaret, the first of five children, was born at the Marine Hotel in Soerabaija. As they sailed home, Sarah fought off a fever, then the ship went through a hurricane and sprang a leak. In his journal Captain Patterson called it "one of the most anxious passages I have ever experienced."[3]
Details of Margaret Patterson's early years are sketchy, but she apparently accompanied her father and a grandfather on other voyages, developing a life-long love of the sea and travel. Her formal education included attendance at Brighton High School in Boston and Thornton Academy in Saco.[4] She also enrolled in a correspondence course offered by L. Prang & Co. and, in 1895, entered Pratt Institute in Brooklyn on scholarship. But she left after only a year.
Like so many unmarried professional women artists of her time, Patterson had a dual career as a teacher. She initially taught art in public schools for 17 years -- probably in Boston from 1898 to 1910. She was apparently a bit ahead of her time in her efforts to foster an appreciation for art in her students. Once, she took a group of children to the Museum of Fine Arts, handed out pencils and paper, and told them to draw whatever they liked. As Horton recounts her story:
Patterson surely found an environment she felt at home in when she became head of the art department at Dana Hall in Wellesley in 1910 a position she held until her retirement in 1940. Founded in 1881, Dana Hall was a preparatory school for girls that espoused the equality of women, avoided unnecessary rules and stressed individual development. Patterson evidently also taught some classes at Pine Manor Junior College, which came under the Dana Hall Schools umbrella. It would appear she really loved teaching, that it wasn't just an economic necessity. Even after her retirement -- at age 72 -- she offered a summer class in landscape painting at her studio, Horn's Hill, on Monhegan Island in Maine for three years.
Most of Patterson's artistic training seems to have come from friendships, associations and short-term studies with other artists. She always gave special credit to Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922) and Charles H. Woodbury (1864-1940), who were among the most enthusiastic and influential teachers of their time.[6]
A driving force of the Arts and Crafts movement, Dow was one of the first American artists to extol the merits of Japanese woodblock prints. He also encouraged art that was rooted in observation of the world, rather than in the imitation of other art. Patterson surely knew the concepts he presented in his popular 1899 instruction manual, Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers -- and probably knew the book as well. Composition is really about good design, Dow noted in his introduction to the 1913 edition. But he shied away from using "design" in the title because "popular usage has restricted it to decoration."
The book includes exercises in line drawing, Notan (a Japanese term referring to relationships between light and dark), and color. Patterson may have done Student Exercise #39, a small ink drawing of houses and trees, as an exercise for Dow. One assignment in his book is to draw a simple landscape with small and large spaces, then to fill in some spaces with black, leaving others white, looking for the most harmonious arrangement.[7] Her drawing certainly fulfills those instructions.
Probably during the 1890s, Patterson also became great friends with Woodbury, who taught thousands of artists at his summer school in Ogunquit, Maine. Like her, he had an affinity for the sea. Like Dow, he stressed the importance of observing nature. He was known for his admonition to "paint in verbs, not in nouns." If Dow sharpened Patterson's sense of design, Woodbury may have fostered her lively brushwork.
Patterson dated her works only sporadically, and her style didn't change dramatically over 50 years, except to grow more daringly colorful and boldly designed. But it's often possible to date her pieces in a general way by observing the subject matter. She generally traveled during her summer vacations, beginning with her first trip to Europe in 1899, and works in her exhibitions often reflected where she'd been the previous year -- though her woodblock prints, in particular, may have been done later.
Initially, she visited northern Europe, including Holland, Belgium, France and Germany -- perhaps at the encouragement of Dow, who'd been to Brittany, and Woodbury, who'd been to Holland. She was attracted by windmills, village streets, and picturesque buildings, and views over rivers and harbors. Patterson's palette was relatively tame at that point, but she still found ways to make the most of color combinations and design possibilities. In a gouache titled Ypres, grass-green shutters on a soft green row house are part of the visual treat. The other part is the way windows, doors, roofs and chimneys diminish quickly in perspective as the eye travels down the sidewalk of a Belgian town. In Twilight, a pastel and watercolor from 1907, dark gray tree branches create an angular pattern against a dusky peach sky with a sliver of pale yellow moon.
By 1909, Patterson had discovered Spain, and Boston art critics discovered just what an exciting colorist she could be. The review of her 1910 show at the Copley Gallery raves: "There can be no doubt that the painter had a good time in Spain; almost every picture of San Juan, Guipuzcoa, Fuenterrabia and San Pedro speaks of the gusto with which she painted these highly-colored and wonderfully picturesque places. There is color of the most extraordinary force in these watercolors. It is, one may say, an orgie of color. The painter could not but let herself go; and her enthusiasm is contagious."[8]
Patterson, who undoubtedly knew of Dow's admiration for Japanese woodblock prints, finally had the opportunity to learn the process during a summer in Paris, when she met someone who could teach her. This may have been the American artist Ethel Mars (1876-1956), who settled in Paris in 1906 and showed her color woodblock prints at the Société Salon d'Automne several times before World War I. But Horton didn't give her name when he related the fortuitous meeting in his manuscript:
"Miss Patterson was first attracted to woodblock printing by a Parisian artist, a young lady whom she met at a tea party in the American Girl's Club at Paris. The girl was attracted to Miss Patterson by a beautiful Persian Turquoise ring which she was wearing, in a setting she had designed herself; Miss Patterson made an agreement with the girl to make her a turquoise ring if she in return would teach her to make block prints."[9]
Patterson exceptional grasp of the medium's potential was quickly matched by the public's appreciation of her talent. Her earliest known color woodblock print is Village of Vilmnitz, Rugen, which dates from 1911. By 1913, she had made enough prints to exhibit them at Galerie Levesque and Barbazanges Gallery in Paris, where Japanese woodblock prints had been so admired by the French Impressionists. In 1914, she introduced them in Boston, exhibiting them -- along with her watercolors -- at Hermann Dudley Murphy's studio at Copley Hall and at the Copley Gallery. The same year, she had a one-person show of her prints at Louis Katz Gallery in New York. Then, in 1915, Worcester Art Museum presented a small solo exhibition of them, and Patterson received honorable mention for her entries at the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. In 1922, Patterson was delighted when all four prints she submitted were selected for the Champs de Mar Paris Salon.
In such early prints as Avenue of Trees, A Dutch Canal and The Swan -- as well as in any number of later works -- Patterson presented rows of trees, making striking use of the negative space between slender trunks, creating patterns as intriguing as the trees themselves. She also made bold decisions regarding the placement of the trees. In The Swan, for instance, their lithe trunks are arranged in silhouette along the horizon, at the edge of some water. Their reflections intersect with the ripples radiating out from around the swan.
It's quite possible -- though sheer conjecture -- that one of Dow's exercises in the use of line in landscape compositions made a deep impression on Patterson. In his book Composition, he presented a spare, linear drawing of a grove of trees, with the barest outline of distant scenery visible between their trunks. Students were to place the components within rectangles of other proportions, to help them see that some arrangements are more effective than others.[10]Whether or not it was her initial impetus, Patterson certainly found a rich source of design possibilities in trees.
When World War I prevented travel to Europe, Patterson visited places around New England, particularly Cape Cod and Monhegan. Surprisingly, when she was on the Cape, she seems to have spent little time in the art colony of Provincetown, which was a magnet for so many expatriate American artists once the war began. Instead, she gravitated to the Outer Cape, the narrow arm of beaches, inlets, marshes, moors and dunes from Chatham to Truro. Cozy cottages had some appeal for her, but she mostly sought out lonely, windswept places near the water.
In the case of a 1918 watercolor titled River and Clouds, Patterson painted an expansive scene dominated by a sky full of clouds. As if manifesting Woodbury's injunction to "paint in verbs," gray stratus clouds streak through a cluster of cumulus clouds that look like scoops of whipped cream. In the bottom quarter of the picture, a river meanders to the sea -- a blue shape intermingling with the ochres and greens of the low-lying landscape. In Summer Clouds, a color woodblock print based on the painting, Patterson managed to retain much of the movement in the clouds and to define the demarcation between land and water more clearly. Both works present the Cape as a slip of land, caught between the sky and sea.
The sandy, windy Cape provided plenty of material to feed Patterson's fascination with the patterns formed by trees. In the woodblock print Salt Creek, Cape Cod, the trunks and branches of a stand of locust trees create a delicate latticework through which to view a curving stream. In a similarly designed oil, also titled Salt Creek, the bark of pine trees is painted in impressionistic dabs of oranges and purples that vibrate on the retina, successfully suggesting hot summer sunshine. There's an especially happy marriage between Patterson's keen sense of design and luscious use of color in Coast Cedars, where two writhing trees hold their own on a rocky shore with yellow sand. The trees' orange trunks and dark green boughs make a stunning statement against a bright blue sky.
Interior of a Workshop, a gouache of a blacksmith shop, may also have been done on the Cape. It was unusual for Patterson to paint inside. It's also unusual for a figure to be more than a footnote. But the blacksmith isn't really the focus here: That honor would go to the burst of orange flames on the forge, which contrast with the blue shadows in the dark interior. Perhaps also dating from World War I is the watercolor Land's End Study, Monhegan. A promontory, jutting out into the water, has only a few basic forms, but Patterson gives them interest by emphasizing the craggy patterns in the headland and the alternating shades of light and dark in the water.
In 1918, Patterson and five other Boston women artists who were breaking with an academic painting style exhibited together at Doll & Richards as "The Group." Patterson -- along with Lucy Scarborough Conant, Laura Coombs Hills, Jane Peterson, Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts and Mary Bradish Titcomb -- probably envisioned themselves as the female counterparts of the Ten American Painters. Their work toured the country, with stops including Worcester Art Museum, Detroit Art Museum and Cleveland Museum of Art.[11]
After the war, Patterson resumed her trips to Europe, with Italy becoming her favorite destination. An undated newspaper clipping reads: "Miss Margaret J. Patterson of Trinity Court, prominent among resident artists sailed at noon today from Boston on the steamship Dante Alighieri, of the Italian Transatlantic, for Europe, where she will spend the summer in painting, as is her custom each year. Last summer Miss Patterson devoted her time to scenes in out-of-the-way places in the mountains of Spain and on the seacoast, and painted also in Italy."[12]
In 1926, when Patterson showed watercolors and woodblock prints of Capri at the Guild of Boston Artists, a critic wrote: "Her work now assumes somewhat the aspect of ultra-modernism. Contrasts of color are the means for effect, with blues and oranges predominating in her pictures, and while they lack certain subtleties, these Italian subjects have most decorative and striking qualities."[13]
Two years later, she exhibited scenes of the islands of Sardinia and Capri and of the Alps near the seaport of Genoa. "Color floods the gallery," reads one review, adding that Patterson "extracted drama and effective composition from every-day Old World scenes, giving personal interpretation to mountain vistas, street architecture and medley of tiled roofs."[14]
This review mentions paintings of pergolas and cypresses silhouetted against blue mountains. Perhaps the gouaches Belvedere Garden and The Old Pergola were done around this time. They represent two aspects of an ancient pergola. Belvedere Garden is a delightful interplay of milky colors. Patterson no doubt enjoyed painting the violet shadows from the rafters and vines crisscrossing the creamy stone columns. The strongly diagonal perspective is similar to what she used in some of her early European street scenes. In The Old Pergola, spontaneous-looking splashes of orange and yellow read as strong sunlight on the pillars. Patterson had a very sure touch. View of Mountains with Cypress Trees was possibly also in the Guild show. Here, the exuberant upsweep of brushstrokes in the trees is as captivating as the scene itself.
Patterson didn't do many woodblock prints of Italy, probably because she found a new motif that blossomed in the medium: flowers. Water Lily was one of four prints Patterson exhibited at a group show at the Boston Art Club in 1920. It seems to have been her first floral. But in the print catalogue published by Goodspeed's Bookshop for Christmas 1924, flower prints are already mentioned as her specialty. When she showed in the major print exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1933, there were five florals among her eight entries.
With their multitude of colors and beautiful shapes, flowers brought out the very best in Patterson's talent as a colorist and aptitude for design. And, perhaps, as she got older, setting up arrangements proved much easier than traveling to Europe. Besides, she evidently just loved flowers. In 1926, she wrote to her sister from Italy:
While her Water Lily had an outdoor setting, Patterson usually placed her flowers in a vase -- though she often didn't show all of it. She brought the blossoms up close and personal, unerringly capturing all of their delicacy, translucence and freshness, so they look, forever, fresh-picked from the garden. And she did it all with the sparest amount of tonal variations in the petals.
Her subjects included daisies, zinnias, marigolds, poppies, pansies, hollyhocks, anemones, petunias and mixed bouquets. Sometimes, she went for simplicity, as in The White Rose, where a single flower in a stem vase -- set off by a few leaves -- divides a solidly colored background (which Patterson printed in both lavender and turquoise) into three elegant segments of negative space. At other times, her arrangements are amazingly complex. In Bleeding Heart, the titular flower -- with its little stems of dangling, rose-colored, heart-shaped pouches -- dances across an artless arrangement that is, of course, very carefully composed. The "choreography" is such that we can note each flower's particular charm, but are most enchanted by their overall impression.
In 1946, when Horton was interviewing her, Patterson was still working and experimenting, seeking to expand her command of the woodblock printmaking process. She was apparently just completing her beautiful White Dogwood print, which had required seven blocks. With a spray of the white blossoms -- artfully cropped against a background of red-orange -- it has all the simplicity and grace of a Japanese print. Horton quotes her as saying, "I feel that all of the knowledge and experience of my life-work is wrapped up in this print."[16]
Patterson died on Feb. 17, 1950. Following funeral services in Boston, she was buried in the family plot at Laurel Hill Cemetery in Saco.[17] It's a beautiful graveyard overlooking the Saco River -- just the sort of place that would make a wonderful Patterson painting.
Notes:
1 Margaret J. Patterson (1867-1950): Retrospective Exhibition ran from Dec. 12, 1988, through Jan. 31, 1989, at James R. Bakker Antiques in Cambridge, Mass. I'm most grateful to Jim Bakker, who is now based in Provincetown, for sharing with me much of the research that he and Feay Shellman Coleman did in preparation for that show and its fine exhibition catalogue. Their careful and insightful work has made mine much easier.
2 H. Leavitt Horton, Margaret Jordan Patterson: Her Life and Work, Unpublished manuscript, [c. 1946]. Boston-New England Art Archives, Fine Arts Department, Boston Public Library. Horton submitted his article to the Print Collector's Quarterly. In return, he received a letter (attached to the manuscript) dated December 7, 1946, saying the publication had been sold. He later noted on the letter that the quarterly had ceased publication.
3 Alfred T. Hill, Voyages (New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1977), pp. 112-113. This book contains excerpts from a journal kept by Captain Alfred Patterson as well as a great deal of information about Margaret Patterson's maternal grandfather, Captain Tristram Jordan. Marie O'Brien, collections coordinator at the Saco Museum, provided some additional information from the unpublished manuscript in a telephone conversation (15 Aug. 2006).
4 "Margaret Patterson, Distinguished Artist and Teacher Was 82," Obituary [newspaper clipping source unknown]. Newspaper clippings footnoted here are from the Willietta Goddard Ball Collection, M.F.A. Artists Files, Boston-New England Art Archives, Fine Arts Department, Boston Public Library.
5 Horton, p. 2.
6 Patterson told Horton she also studied with [Claudio] Castelucho (1870-1927) and [Alexandre de Riquer i] Angalada (1856-1920) in Paris.
7 Arthur Wesley Dow, Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1913), p. 70.
8 "Pictures by Miss Patterson," Boston Transcript, 5 April 1910.
9 Horton, p. 1.
10 Dow, p. 45.
11 Mary Bradish Titcomb and Her Contemporaries: The Artists of Fenway Studios, exh. cat. (Boston: Vose Galleries of Boston, 1998).
12 "Sailed Today for Europe" [newspaper clipping -- source unknown]
13 "Italian Scenes," [Boston Transcript], 26 March 1926.
14 "Miss Patterson Exhibits," [Boston Transcript], March 1928.
15 Margaret Patterson, Letter to Alice Patterson Wheeler, 5 July 1926, as quoted in Margaret J. Patterson (1867-1950): Retrospective Exhibition, exh. cat. (Cambridge, Mass.: James R. Bakker Antiques, Inc., 1988), p. 21.
16 Horton, n. pag.
17 Obituary, confirmed with Laurel Hill Cemetery in telephone conversation (15 Aug. 2006).
Images:
(above: Margaret Jordan Patterson, "Bleeding Heart," color woodblock print on paper, 9_ x 14 1/16 inches; collection of Remak Ramsay)
(above: Margaret Jordan Patterson, "Bonny Doon," watercolor and gouache on brown paper, 11 x 15 inches; private collection)
(above: Margaret Jordan Patterson, "Cape Cod Hills," oil on canvas board, 12 x 15 inches; private collection)
(above: Margaret Jordan Patterson, "Cape Cod Landscape," c. 1915, watercolor and gouache on paper, 15 x 18 inches; collection of James R. Bakker)
(above: Margaret Jordan Patterson, "Interior of a Workshop," gouache over charcoal on brown paper, 7 x 10 inches; collection of Remak Ramsay)
(above: Margaret Jordan Patterson, "The Old Pergola," gouache and charcoal on gray paper, 10 x 14 inches; private collection)
(above: Margaret Jordan Patterson, "River and Clouds," watercolor over charcoal on cream paper, 15_ x 18_ inches; collection of Remak Ramsay)
(above: Margaret Jordan Patterson, "Salt Creek," c. 1915-1920, oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches; courtesy of Diamond Antiques & Fine Arts, West Harwich)
(above: Margaret Jordan Patterson, "Spring Flowers," color woodblock print on paper, 7 x 10 inches; courtesy of Diamond Antiques & Fine Arts, West Harwich)
(above: Margaret Jordan Patterson, "Summer Clouds," color woodblock print on paper, 9 x 10 3/8 inches; collection of Remak Ramsay)
(above: Margaret Jordan Patterson, "Twilight" (aka "Early Evening"), 1907, pastel and watercolor on paper, 12 x 10 inches; collection of James R. Bakker)
(above: Margaret Jordan Patterson, "White Dogwood," color woodblock print on paper, 9_ x 14 1/16 inches; collection of Remak Ramsay)
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