Mary Bradish Titcomb

Mary Bradish Titcomb began a career teaching drawing in the public schools of Brockton, MA. In 1888, she resigned from her position as director of drawing and moved to Boston to begin artistic studies under Boston Impressionists Edmund C. Tarbell and Frank W. Benson, and at the Boston Museum School with Philip Hale. In 1895, Titcomb traveled to Paris to study with Jules Lefebvre. On subsequent trips to Europe she painted in Italy, Spain and England, always returning to Boston, where she was inducted into the Copley Society, the most prestigious art society in New England. She began signing her works, "M. Bradish Titcomb" in 1895 to avoid discrimination as a woman artist. Titcomb's winters were spent in her Boston studio painting commissioned portraits, while summers were spent traveling abroad and painting the New England coast, where she owned studios in Provincetown and Marblehead. President Woodrow Wilson's purchase of a painting by Titcomb at the Corcoran Art Gallery in 1915 and his public praise of her work brought the artist additional success and fame. Beginning around 1917, when Titcomb joined other women painters who called themselves "The Group," her painting style evolved from traditional Boston Impressionism to one that integrated the stylistic ideas of modernism. She is one of select few women considered integral to the Boston School tradition. A consistent, vibrant painter, Titcomb often included architecture in her compositions, around which she developed her landscapes and figures.