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Esther Crawford
(1872-1958)
Born on April 23, 1872, in Atlanta, Georgia, Esther Mabel Crawford, the daughter of Louis G. and Susan (Farnam) Crawford, grew up in Atlanta and then, after 1882, in Louisville, Kentucky. Well educated in art, she received her early training at the Cincinnati Art Academy under Lewis H. Meakin, Thomas Noble, and Joseph H. Sharp, 1894-1898. She also studied in Paris with James M. Whistler, 1900; at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, 1901; at the South Kensington School of Design, London, England; in Chicago, Illinois, with Bror Nordfeldt; and in Japan. Among her other teachers were Alphonse Mucha, Arthur W. Dow, and Otto Walter Beck.
Esther spent the early years of the 1900s mostly in New York and Chicago, where she taught at the University of Chicago in 1908 and subsequently in Jacksonville, Illinois. Afterward, she went to Japan and China, 1909-1910, and then returned briefly to Chicago before accepting a position in the art department of the California State Normal School (now University of California, Los Angeles), Los Angeles, California in 1911. She remained a resident of Southern California thereafter but continued to travel. She devoted much of her effort after 1911 to oils and block prints of California views and, on occasion, to landscapes and scenes in Arizona and New Mexico.
Esther exhibited in Paris in 1900 and she had a solo show at the Royar Gallery in Los Angeles in 1915. She passed away on November 21, 1958, in San Gabriel, California.
Exhibited: Society of Western Artists, Detroit, Michigan; Architectural League of New York; Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; San Francisco Art Association; Panama-California Exposition, San Diego; California State Fair, Sacramento; California Art Club, Los Angeles; Women Painters of the West, Los Angeles; Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe; Santa Cruz Art League, California; Springville Museum of Art, Utah; Laguna Beach Art Association; and Southern States Art League.
Source:
St. Gaudens, Maurine. "Emerging from the Shadows: A Survey of Women Artsist Working in California, 1860-1960" Vol. 1. 2015.
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