Mary Rogers Williams: Defying Her Era's Expectations

Annual Julia Q. Keggi Lecture

Sunday, August 14th, 2:00–3:00 pm  

Price: $25 Members | $30 General 

Revolutionary artist Mary Rogers Williams (1857-1907), a baker’s daughter from Hartford, lived an extraordinary life. She biked and hiked from the Arctic Circle to Naples, exhibited from Paris to Indianapolis, trained at the Art Students League, chafed against art world rules that favored men, wrote thousands of pages about her travels and work, and taught at Smith College for nearly two decades, but sadly ended up almost totally obscure.

Eve M. Kahn, an independent scholar and past weekly Antiques columnist for The New York Times, will lecture on how one research phone call in 2012 led to her prizewinning book, Forever Seeing New Beauties: The Forgotten Impressionist Mary Rogers Williams, 1857-1907 (Wesleyan University Press, 2019).