May 24, 2014 is the Centennial of the birth of Mary
Sinclair. This exhibition covers sixty-five years of paintings, prints, and
drawings, from 1933 to 1997.
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| Mary Sinclair, Judith Practicing, 1978 |
A
Detroit native, Mary Sinclair (1914-2004) grew up in Connecticut. She lost her
father, Samuel Eastwick Sinclair, at the Second Battle of the Marne in 1918.
Her mother, Grace Elizabeth Williams, was a commercial artist. She married
again, to colleague George Annand. Mary Sinclair was Annand’s model for the now
iconic National Biscuit Company’s child in a yellow raincoat. Sinclair started
to make art seriously as a child; she was nine years old when New York’s Macy’s
Department Store incorporated her drawing The
Queen into one of their advertisements.
After
graduating from Darien High School, Connecticut, Sinclair attended the Art
Students League, New York City, from 1931 to 1933. There she met fellow student Will Barnet
(1911-2012); they were married from 1933 to 1952. In the 1930s and 40s Sinclair
taught art at the Birch Wathen School, NY (now the Birch Wathen Lenox School).
Her second marriage, in the early 1950s was to the doctor and artist Joshua
Epstein.
Sinclair
had six children: Peter, Richard, Todd, Mary Elizabeth (Betsy), Margaret
(Peggy), and Judith. Peter Barnet and Richard Barnet both became artists. Her
children, her home, and her Union City, New Jersey, neighborhood, were
Sinclair’s most important subjects. She considered herself an impressionist.
Richard Barnet noted, “The skill and beauty of Mary Sinclair’s drawing-in-color
does not stand alone. Rather, central to her work are the compositions. She
always builds powerful designs from these elements: people and the places they
inhabit.”
Throughout
her life Sinclair was an active member of the artists’ community and she
participated in group shows across the country. At the National Arts Club, NY,
a work received the Best Oil Painting Award, 1975, and two pieces were included
in American Modernist Drawings, at the Susan Teller Gallery, September 3--28,
2013. Sinclair had one-person shows at the New School for Social Research, the
Van Diemen Lilienfeld Galleries (with Joshua Epstein), 1950, the Hilda Carmel
Gallery, the Education Alliance of New York, the Carl Ashby Gallery, NY; the
College of Mount Saint Vincent, 1992, Riverdale, NY (which also has a work by
Sinclair in their permanent collection); and the Robert Hutchins Gallery, Maplewood,
NJ, 1996.
