Mabel Dwight

Mabel Dwight (1875–1955) was an American artist and Broadway performer. Born in Cincinnati and raised in New Orleans, she relocated with her family to San Francisco in the late 1880s, where she studied under Arthur Mathews at the Mark Hopkins Institute. Her stage career ran from 1902 to 1910, during which she appeared in several Broadway productions, including the musical Foxy Grandpa, the musical A Trip to Japan, and The International Cup, the Ballet of Niagra, and the Earthquake. Her later career as a printmaker brought her widespread recognition, and in 1936 Prints magazine named her one of the best living printmakers in the country.

While still in San Francisco, Dwight demonstrated early artistic promise. In early 1899, a critic for the local weekly The Wave praised her portraits as the finest in a show, describing them as handled with delicacy and feeling characteristic of a true colorist. That same year she joined the San Francisco Sketch Club and became one of its directors, and in 1898 she had contributed the illustration for the cover of the club's exhibition catalog. She subsequently received a portrait commission from the monthly review The Critic and, after moving to Manhattan with her parents, was commissioned by a publisher to produce illustrations for a book about animals in the western United States. The resulting thirteen drawings included a frontispiece depicting deer, and a critic described the pictures as delightful and likely to appeal to readers of all ages.

In her mid-twenties, Dwight accompanied Helen Bartlett Bridgman, wife of explorer Herbert Lawrence Bridgman, on a world tour that included stops in Egypt, Ceylon, India, Java, and Great Britain. She returned to the United States in 1903 and rejoined her parents in Greenwich Village. From 1903 to 1906 she listed herself in the American Art Annual as a painter and illustrator. In 1906 she married fellow artist Eugene Patrick Higgins, and despite both holding socialist views that included advocacy for equality of the sexes, Dwight took on the role of helpmate and set aside her painting. The couple had no children, and in 1917 they separated, after which Dwight resumed her artistic career.

The following year she joined Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's newly founded Whitney Studio Club and became secretary to the club's director, Juliana Force. She attended life drawing sessions and participated in the club's annual exhibitions, working primarily in watercolor while also experimenting with etching. When she exhibited a painting called Nocturne at a club show in December 1918, a critic for American Art News described it as a black picture containing a nude female figure of uncommon line and tone. A 1923 watercolor depicting visitors at a public aquarium drew praise from a critic who called it both amusing and competently handled, and a critic for the New York Sun, reviewing a 1926 Whitney Club exhibition, wrote that Dwight was a wit whose paintings of subjects observed in the subway, parks, and other public spaces wove in insidious criticism of her fellow citizens.

Dwight had met the New York art print dealer Carl Zigrosser around 1913, and with his encouragement she traveled to Paris in 1926 to spend a year studying lithographic art at the Atelier Duchatel. There she made sketches of people engaged in everyday activities — watching puppet shows, sitting in cafés, worshiping, and browsing stalls along the Seine — and developed those sketches into lithographic prints. The characters she depicted conveyed their personalities and individual foibles through posture and gesture as much as through facial expression. When the Philadelphia Print Club exhibited her complete lithographic works in 1929, critic C. H. Bonte of the Philadelphia Inquirer observed that she was above all interested in people and their characters, and that rich skill had been employed in giving individual distinction to the details of what he called her human comedy.

Within a year of returning from Paris, Dwight had established herself as one of America's leading lithographic artists. In 1928, Zigrosser arranged her first solo exhibition, held at the Weyhe Galleries, where a critic for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted her flair for the fantastic and romantic and her tendency to respond to the humorous aspects of life. A lithograph from that year, Deserted Mansion, attracted considerable attention; the Philadelphia Inquirer critic wrote that she had infused the subject with a sensed spirit of mystery. Dwight herself later remarked that the place reminded her of Jane Eyre, noting that the upper windows looked at one with the insane expression that windows of long-empty houses acquire.

Her 1929 lithograph Ferry Boat was selected by the Institute of Graphic Arts as one of its Fifty Prints of the Year. Writing in the New York Times, Edward Alden Jewell cited it among her notable works in 1932 and noted in 1937 that it had become long familiar to audiences. Carl Zigrosser later called the print immortal in a review of four contemporary printmakers. In 1930, Fortune magazine commissioned Dwight to illustrate an article titled To Make a Circus Pay. When she was given a second solo exhibition at the Weyhe Gallery in 1932, showing watercolors and drawings alongside her prints, Jewell wrote that her work evoked a range of moods, from solemn depictions of decaying mansions and graveyards to frankly carefree and even hilarious scenes of circuses and rent parties. Between the late 1920s and the early 1940s, Dwight achieved both popular and critical success, and a critic of the period described her as one of the foremost lithographers in the United States. Zigrosser, who had studied her work carefully, wrote that it was imbued with pity and compassion, a sense of irony, and the understanding that comes of deep experience.