BRUSHES WITH GREATNESS

ith their paints, palettes and plenty of spunk, women artists journeyed to Arizona during the first decades of the 20th century to render the grand landscape and sweeping sky. Undaunted ted by Arizona's harsh climate and reputation for outlaws and Indians, women artists surprisingly outnumbered male artists during the late Territorial and early statehood periods. No “Sunday afternoon painters,” these academically trained women artists came from New York, Philadelphia and Chicago, with serious artistic ambitions.

Arizona offered women artists wide-open spaces to realize their dreams. Canvases ablaze with color, they captured the beauty of a land as boundless as its opportunities for self-discovery. Although roughly a dozen women settlers altered Arizona's early cultural landscape, this story spotlights four who made momentous contributions: Mary-Russell Ferrell Colton, Kate Thompson Cory, Lillian Wilhelm Smith and Jessie Benton Evans. While each settled in Arizona for individual reasons, all left a profound and enduring mark on the developing land.

AS A YOUNG GIRL IN UNIONTOWN, OHIO, JESSIE BENTON

Evans (1866-1954) was lulled to sleep by her father's bedtime stories of cultural heroes and the splendors of ancient civilizations. Forever thereafter seeking culture and adventure, she studied art at Oberlin College and the Art Institute of Chicago, and married Denver Evans, a wealthy Chicago fruit importer who supported her on cultural excursions throughout Rome, Florence, Verona, Naples and Paris. Adept in French, Spanish, Italian, Greek and German, in addition to English, the bright, beautiful and artistically gifted Jessie traveled gracefully in international art circles and exhibited her paintings in prestigious Paris salons. While Arizona became the couple's much loved home for over 40 years, Jessie and Denver had discovered their desert paradise in 1912 when seeking only a temporary residence as a warmer climate for Jessie's health. Captivated by the landscape, they purchased a magnificent 40-acre lot on the southeast flank of Camelback Mountain in Phoenix, building an elaborate Italian villa as a home and art studio. Surrounded by tall cypresses, arbors, grottoes, sunken gardens, fountains and a pool, the house was adorned with antiques from abroad. Evans' paintings of desert scenes filled her art studio. Her canvases, painted en plein air and in Impressionist style influenced by excursions abroad, captured the many moods of Arizona. She said, “Everything is here except the sea, but one gets the effect of the sea looking over the vast expanses of desert. The wide spaces give an uplifting feeling of infinity, the eternity of things.” (The couple's only child, an architect and contractor, built a commissioned home on the property, which in 1930 became the Jokake Inn, boasting the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts as guests; and in 1944, he constructed the Paradise Inn. Both hotels were eventually sold and the splendid setting would become the property of The Phoenician Resort.) Eager to create a cultural community, she organized art clubs and exhibitions, hosted events, and gave art lectures in schools. “She was a trailblazer who drew artists, authors, actors and musicians from all over the state to salons at her home and ultimately to Jokake Inn,” recalls James Ballinger, director of Phoenix Art Museum. “She created an early art scene and was the glue that held it together.” Her great-granddaughter and namesake (also a landscape painter, who as a young girl painted with her great-grandmother, easels side-by-side), recalls, “She promoted the arts in every way she could, yet managed to paint almost every day, always faithful to her motto: 'Rest is rust.'” Evans' paintings are held in the collections of Phoenix Art Museum and Arizona State University Art Museum; they are not currently on display.

ONLY ONE WOMAN EVER ILLUSTRATED NOVELS BY FAMED

Western writer Zane Grey: Lillian Wilhelm Smith (1882-1971). A precocious talent, the artist began her studies at New York's Art Student's League, an esteemed school for adults, where gifted teens could apply. Smith qualified at age 12. Raised on New York's Upper West Side with seven siblings, the artist's family home included a governess, cook, maid and seamstress. Outings to art galleries, museums and the theater were the norm. When her father's business hit hard times and the family's domestic servants were cut back,

Lillian, the eldest, took on much childcare and housework. An adolescent, her diary reveals exasperation (with typical teenage melodrama): “Oh I am burning to shake off all the trammels of conventionality and stand alone free and for Art!” Romance not hers, but her cousin Lina's would alter her fate. Zane Grey, soon to be one of the most successful writers of his time, married Lina and settled near New York. When Buffalo Bill Cody's famed Wild West Show came to Manhattan's Madison Square Garden, Grey invited Lillian backstage to paint portraits of the show's Sioux and Arapaho actors. The following year, when Grey traveled to Arizona's Rainbow Bridge as inspiration for his novel, The Rainbow Trail, he asked her along to create illustrations for the book, certain he could persuade his publisher to buy the artworks despite the fact that a woman had painted them. Indeed, her paintings of the sacred landscape's sandstone cliffs, canyons and natural bridge would become the striking cover art and illustrations for the novel. Twenty years later, the artist vividly described her experience on Phoenix radio: “I was initiated into my life in this blessed land by a 400-mile horseback trip, accompanied by a chuck wagon with supplies. We left Flagstaff to penetrate into the shimmering beauty of the Painted Desert region.... Our dear old guide, Al Doyle, who showed me how to ride like a cowboy so that the long 25 and 30 miles that constituted the day's loping and trotting would not too greatly tire me, showed me to a place at the end of the day where I could paint, and try and, oh how I tried, sometimes to the point of tears to interpret the divine beauty of those sunsets.” After traveling to Arizona to illustrate subsequent titles by Grey (The Border Legion and The Last Trail), the artist settled in Phoenix in 1917. In 1924, she married the love of her life, a wrangler, Jesse Raymond Smith. Author Donna Ashworth wryly describes Smith's life story as a typical Zane Grey tale: “Eastern woman comes to Arizona; discovers a huge fantastic country; marries a noble cowboy; and rides on trails most people only dream of.” (In fact, Jesse Smith was a model for Grey's fictional characters Brazos Keene and Pecos Smith.) Lillian and Jesse's “trails” would take them throughout the state, where she captured in paint the panoramic views of remote locales for which she became known. The couple also operated trading posts, dude ranches and B&Bs from Sedona down to the Mexican border. Of her new life, Smith mused, “It is human nature to be lured into adventure by the unfamiliar and the unknown.” View Lillian Wilhelm Smith's paintings at Sharlot Hall Museum, 415 W. Gurley Street, Prescott, 928-445-3122, sharlot.org; Museum of Northern Arizona, 3101 N. Fort Valley Road, Flagstaff, 928-774-5213, musnaz.org.

FOLLOWING THE GRITTY, STICKY NEW YORK CITY SUMMER

In 1905, Kate Thompson Cory (1861-1958), an academically trained artist and illustrator, headed west for a holiday. On the advice of fellow artist Louis Akin, Cory journeyed to Arizona to join an artists' colony of painters, writers and musicians on the Hopi Indian Reservation. Enchanted by the scenery on a two-day buckboard ride to the pueblo, following a train ride to Canyon Diablo, Cory wrote, “That wonderful group of mountains I now saw, like sapphires, bloomed with opal, pulsing on the horizon.” Yet, upon arrival, she was disappointed, as illustrated by this entry in her diary: “It materialized that Louis' plan did not bring the party to the reservation and thus I became the 'colony.'” Nevertheless, Cory stayed. Remaining on the reservation for seven years, she initially lived in a government village below the mesas before receiving a welcome invitation to reside at the pueblo in a Hopi-owned dwelling in Oraibi (regarded as America's oldest permanent settlement). Her new home on the top floor of the highest house in the village offered a wonderful view. "You reached it by ladders and little stone steps, and made your peace with the growling dogs on the ascent; but oh! the view..." wrote Cory of her main living quarters, which had limited space and low ceilings, "head-bumping in some places," she noted.

Honored as one of the few outsiders permitted to view the heart of Hopi life, Cory documented, in both paint and photography, many of the tribe's everyday activities, as well as sacred ceremonies forbidden to most. Her photographs portray an ease and familiarity with her subjects engaging in ordinary activities in everyday clothing. Consisting today of more than 600 photographic negatives, Cory's invaluable collection also includes the only visual record of various Hopi customs no longer practiced.

At age 51, Cory moved to Prescott and returned to painting with a focus on the local landscape. Remaining in Prescott until her death at age 95, she completed many canvases inspired by the land, and continued supporting Native American culture and causes.

Kate Thompson Cory's Arizona landscapes and portraits, as well as her photographs, are exhibited at Smoki Museum, 147 N. Arizona Street, Prescott, 928-445-1230, smokimuseum.org; Sharlot Hall Museum, 415 W. Gurley Street, Prescott, 928-445-3122, sharlot.org.

MARY-RUSSELL FERRELL COLTON (1889-1971) WAS RAISED TO

conform to societal standards as a cultured and charming hostess among Philadelphia high society. Possessing natural artistic talent and keen intelligence, she entered Philadelphia School of Design for Women at age 15, graduating with honors.

Yet Colton, of strong and independent spirit, would not devote herself to painting floral-patterned china and embroidering handkerchiefs. With ambitions ahead of her time, she opened an art studio in downtown Philadelphia, obtained commercial work in restoration and illustration, and exhibited her paintings with the Ten Philadelphia Painters - a group of progressive women artists she helped organize. Their acclaimed exhibitions would ultimately travel to major museums and galleries nationwide.

She also joined remote camping expeditions, "roughing it" for two consecutive summers in the Selkirk Mountains of British Columbia, where she met Harold Colton, a professor of zoology at the University of Pennsylvania.

A perfect match for her brainpower and enthusiasm for the natural world, he also supported her talent and encouraged her career. Wed in 1912, they went West for an adventurous California honeymoon. A spur-of-the-moment stop in Flagstaff to climb the alluring San Francisco Peaks would determine their destiny and the history of Flagstaff forever.

Mary-Russell, free amid a forest paradise in a flannel shirt and bloomers, sketched sun-dappled pine woodlands and breathtaking canyons. The magical setting would bring Mary-Russell and Harold back for subsequent summers, until they settled in Flagstaff for good in 1926.

As residents, the young couple enjoyed meandering horseback rides beneath towering cottonwoods and cloudless skies, discovering and exploring Native American ruins. Determined to encourage support for the Native American arts and crafts they were drawn to, and to provide a cultural foundation for their adopted town, they ambitiously founded Flagstaff's Museum of Northern Arizona.

Mary-Russell served as curator of art and ethnology, and Harold was the museum's director. Mary-Russell zealously launched the annual Hopi Craftsman Exhibition (which became the pre-eminent Native American arts and crafts show in the nation), and Exhibition of Arizona Artists, as well as assembled museum collections by acquiring and cataloging thousands of Native American artifacts, crafts and works of art. Researching and writing papers and books on the techniques of Hopi craftspeople, she became known as one of the country's leading experts in Native American arts and crafts.

Colton painted more than 100 landscapes of her beloved Arizona by her early 60s, when debilitation from what would likely be diagnosed today as Alzheimer's disease stole her abilities. Ultimately, her continued decline required admission to a Phoenix hospital, where she died in 1971.

See Mary-Russell Ferrell Colton's portrait and many of her paintings at the Museum of Northern Arizona, 3101 N. Fort Valley Road, Flagstaff, 928 774-5213, musnaz.org.