Kate Carew

Kate Carew was the pseudonym of Mary Williams, an American caricaturist and illustrator born on June 27, 1869, in Oakland, California, who died on February 11, 1961, at the age of 91 in a Pacific Grove rest home. She also appeared on Broadway, with credits including The Red Mill and The Luck of the Navy, spanning the years 1906 to 1919.

Williams began her formal art training at San Francisco's School of Design under Arthur Mathews. In 1891 she received the school's Special Medal for Excellence in Painting at the local Art Association's Winter Annual, and between 1891 and 1895 her work earned additional recognition at the California State Fair. Her education continued at the Convent of Notre Dame in San Jose, the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art at the University of California, the Atelier Colarossi in Paris, and the New York School of Art. She also exhibited at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Her brother was the illustrator Gluyas Williams.

Following the 1897 death of her first husband, Seymour Chapin Davison, Williams secured a position as a staff illustrator of portrait sketches at The San Francisco Examiner under the sponsorship of Ambrose Bierce. In 1899 she relocated to New York City, establishing a studio-residence on West Twenty-Fourth Street. There, Joseph Pulitzer hired her to produce caricature drawings and celebrity interviews for his Sunday World and Evening World publications under the pseudonym Kate Carew, a name she would use for the remainder of her professional life. She styled herself "The Only Woman Caricaturist" and ultimately produced approximately 500 pieces for New York City newspapers, as well as contributions to the London Tatler, The Patrician, and Eve.

In 1901 Williams married the Australian journalist and playwright Henry Kellett Chambers. A son, Colin Chambers, was born in September 1910, and the following year she divorced Chambers on grounds of his infidelities with the Mexican writer Maria Cristina Mena. In 1911 the Sunday World dispatched her to Europe to produce the series Kate Carew Abroad. During her time in London and Paris she conducted interviews with Pablo Picasso, Rostand, John Galsworthy, George Moore, Émile Zola, Bret Harte, and Lady Sackville-West, among others. She was also among those who traveled with Abdul-Baha, then head of the Baháʼí Faith, during his visit to the United States, accompanying him on April 16, 1912, when he visited the Bowery. Williams noted her impression of his generosity in bringing people of social standing to the Bowery and his practice of giving money directly to the poor.

A severe illness in December 1913 required surgery and prompted her return to the United States. While conducting interviews in Hollywood for the London Strand, she met John A. Reed, a British-born man whom she married in December 1916. The following spring the couple moved to Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, where Williams became an exhibiting member of the Carmel Arts and Crafts Club. She mounted a solo exhibition at Monterey's Hotel Del Monte featuring more than two dozen caricatures, subjects of which included Woodrow Wilson, Mark Twain, and Ethel Barrymore. Beginning in the early 1920s, a severe wrist injury curtailed her career, and the Reeds lived primarily at Guernsey in the Channel Islands or in France. She exhibited at the Salon des Artistes of Paris in both 1924 and 1928, displaying Farm at Hyeres on the latter occasion. The couple returned to the Monterey Peninsula in June 1938. John Reed died in June 1941 at a sanatorium in St. Helena. Williams returned to Monterey in the spring of 1943, purchased the former home of painter Lucy Valentine Pierce, and devoted her subsequent work to seascapes and landscapes. She is buried in Oakland.