Mary Bradish Titcomb

Joan Michelman, Ltd., New York

Acquired from the above in 1999 by the present owner

Mary Bradish Titcomb was an American Impressionist based in Boston who was greatly celebrated during her own lifetime—President Woodrow Wilson himself purchased one of her paintings in 1915—but largely forgotten after her death. With a style defined by spirited brushstrokes and saturated colors, Titcomb crafted her own visual language within the movement’s broader historical context. Part of a set of six female artists called “The Group,” she, along with artists such as Margaret Jordan Patterson, Jane Peterson and Lucy Scarborough Conant, sought to break away from the conservative painting style that dominated the Boston artistic milieu in the early 20th century.

In the present work, Titcomb pairs her characteristic luminous color palette with her abiding interest in the geometric possibilities of buildings, crafting a composition defined by the sharp diagonals of human settlement contrasted with the languid curves of the azure harbor. Possibly influenced by Arthur Wesley Dow’s landscape woodblock prints, Titcomb plays with flattened perspective and pattern in Québec Harbor to form a masterful landscape with structured line and form yet infused with a sense of light and air.