Martha Richardson Fine Art represents the estate of Hilda Belcher. Belcher, one of the country’s leading portrait and genre painters in the early 20th century, was the second woman to be elected to the National Academy of Design. In 1935, Anne Miller Downes, novelist and reviewer for The New York Times, wrote that Hilda Belcher is “one of the most distinguished women artists in America.” (Savannah Morning News, 1935).
Belcher, a masterful watercolorist and portraitist, was born in Pittsford, Vermont in 1881. After graduation, she moved to New York to pursue her career as an artist. The young artist was among the few female students to attend the New York School of Art. She also studied at the Art Students League and the Chase School, run by William Merritt Chase. Belcher was a student of George Bellows, George Luks and Kenneth Hayes-Miller, but drew her greatest inspiration from her studies with Robert Henri, the founder of the Ashcan School. Through Henri, Belcher found her artistic voice; her portraits and subjects of every day life were painted in her own distinctive style of realism.
In 1908, Belcher entered a piece into the New York Water Color Club contest. She was awarded the prestigious Strathmore Prize (first place), the only female among 692 male competitors. Belcher continued to win major awards at the National Academy, Pennsylvania Academy, New York Water Color Club, American Water Color Society, among many others and enjoyed significant publicity. In 1910, three of her works were included in Henri’s landmark Exhibition of Independent Artists, a challenge to the National Academy’s conservative values.
Throughout the 1910s, while an active member in the New York art world, Belcher began to sell her work regularly to private collectors and museums, and to exhibit in a number of important museum shows. She continued to win major prizes in national watercolor and painting competitions. In 1932, after winning the prestigious Lippincott Prize for Portrait by Night, a thief cut the painting from its frame as it hung in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art; the painting is still lost.
In 1910, and then again in 1913, Belcher traveled to Europe with her mother, the artist Martha Wood Belcher, and they painted scenes throughout England and the Continent. A lovely 1913 watercolor titled Magnificent Mourning, depicts a melancholy woman walking on the promenade at Penzance .
Belcher received a portrait commission from a family in Savannah, Georgia in 1913. She fell in love with the city and returned frequently throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In Savannah, she taught at the Telfair Academy and painted portraits and genre scenes of local southern life. Belcher was close to many in Savannah’s vibrant African-American community and she is well known for her elegant portrayals of African-American men, women and children whom she painted with a deep sensitivity and respect. Belcher’s impressive 1936 painting, Go Down Moses (Greenville County Museum, Greenville, South Carolina), is the culmination of her many watercolors and drawings of African-American life in Savannah. It was exhibited that same year to critical acclaim at the National Academy of Design.
Throughout the 1930’s, Belcher lived in New York and traveled to Savannah. She made a good living creating artwork in her signature realistic style. The Times Tower, with its view of the city and charming young subjects, is an evocative example of the artist’s talents. In 1939, she traveled to Mexico and was greatly influenced by the local architecture and aesthetics. In the early 1940s, the artist’s health declined and she returned to Pittsford. She became less productive as her condition worsened. Though Belcher rarely exhibited new work, by 1960 her paintings and watercolors had been included in 21 solo exhibitions throughout the country. In 1963, Hilda Belcher died.
