Mary Creamer Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1892 - d. 1975

American artist Mary Creamer, active ca. 1925 - 1975, was a teacher and painter of portraiture, the figure, still-life and landscape in both oil and watercolor. Absent any birth, census (pre-1940), marriage, or death records in this name, Creamer's biographical details remained almost wholly hidden, and details of her artistic career not pursued, until the recent September 2011 location of a painting signed "Mary Creamer" with an original label verso bearing her un-wed sister's name.(1)

Mary Creamer was born Edna Pearl King to James Robert King and Leona L. (Weldon) King in Hart Co, KY on 23 April 1892. (2) Her seamstress mother, Leona, by 1910 twice divorced and single, had moved with her two daughters Edna "Mary" and Bernice, from Kentucky to Indiana. In that year (1910), Mary, age 17, was boarding with Indiana friends living in St. Louis MO. It was evidently there where she met the Missouri native Charles P. Creamer; they were married on 14 April 1914. (3)

The youthful Creamer took her earliest instruction in art in St. Louis, at Washington University; but it was sometime after 1920, following relocation to Oklahoma City, that during a lengthy hospital stay - when medical wisdom predicted a virtual certainty of losing her eyesight and perhaps her life - that Creamer was sustained by a commitment to becoming an artist, and immediately upon release entered the School of Art at the University of Oklahoma (Norman).(4)

Creamer's Church in the Oil Fields, painted in her first semester there, took a second prize in a state show; impressed by the young artist's talent, instructor Genoa Morris (5) arranged for a local exhibition of Creamer's work, at which eighteen paintings immediately sold [LAJ].
From her home in Oklahoma City Creamer would frequently thereafter travel to study, paint and exhibit both in the east and in the west. Early on, in the East, she worked with Margaret Fitzhugh Browne (1887-1972) in Boston: from her Creamer was doubtless able to develop her facility in figure-painting, as well as the floral still-life, in both of which Browne excelled. In addition to time in Gloucester and Springfield Massachusetts, Creamer also took instruction with the noted watercolorist, instructor and author Eliot O'Hara ([1890-1969] likely in New York but possibly Maine). By the mid-1930s Creamer had - on the evidence, typically over summers - begun painting trips in the other direction, first in Taos NM, and soon thereafter in Santa Fe.(6)

The call of the Southwest would eventually find Mary Creamer and her husband moving to southern California, sometime after 1941. From there the painterly environs of Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico were relatively accessible; but there, too, in Los Angeles and especially Taos, did Creamer find a supportive and growing community of artists and teachers. Among the latter was William Frederick Foster (1883-1953), a native mid-westerner who studied first with Frank Duveneck in Cincinnati and then with Robert Henri and William Merritt Chase in New York. Foster worked primarily as an illustrator until 1930, and Creamer is likely to have known him from her earlier trips in NY: one is invited to wonder if Foster's influence as an illustrator, joined to the figure training with Browne, was influential in Mary Creamer's execution of In the Land of Nod, said to have "later won no fewer than eight awards in two years, four of them juried in New York." (7)

Having moved to Los Angeles in 1932, Foster taught at the Chouinard School of Art and also gave private classes in his own studio: it is presumably there that Creamer took further training from him. Both were active members of the California Arts Association (Los Angeles), as was the younger artist and teacher Nell Walker Warner (1891-1970). Creamer doubtless knew Warner during the latter's years as a young teacher in the Los Angeles area, and perhaps also from their common interests harbor scenes: both had traveled widely, including to Europe but also visiting Gloucester to paint, and when Warner moved north to the ocean-side art colony of Carmel CA in 1952, Creamer spent time with her there.(8)

Mary Creamer lived in Dana Point (near Laguna Beach), San Diego, and Banning, but by mid-60s was traveling with enough regularity to paint, exhibit and teach in Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico that in 1964 she and her husband established a second "permanent residence at her Taos home" [TN1] that summer. It was near this time, "by way of rounding out her ability as a portrait artist," that she learned from the noted painter Henry Balink (1882-1963) in Santa Fe how to "render the flesh tones and physical forms" of native American Indians: her canvas entitled My Son is reported [LAJ] to have won many awards and "prompted the Taos masters to request the same models, [and] the same pose too."

In summers she taught classes at Taos, Carson City, and Reno, exhibiting her traditional representational art - portraits, landscapes and still-life - at the Nevada Art Gallery / State Museum in Reno and at smaller galleries there (the Blue Door, Carson Furniture Gallery, the Village Gallery, etc.). (9)

In shows, Mary Creamer had as of 1965 won 18 first prizes, 16 second awards, 15 honorable mentions, four purchase awards, three sweepstakes, and others. In 1967 she taught at South Plains College in Levelland TX [LAJ]. Thereafter she was an active participant in the California Art Club, remaining a member through 1979: in the November 1974 CAC show at their Westwood Galleries, she exhibited Window in the Sky, California Landscape, Hawaiian Inlet, and Morning in the Desert. Though sometimes rendering canvases in the impressionist style (see for example her excellent African Violet), Creamer was committed to traditional realist representations of her subjects - this, she said, "because I like God's ideas as they are. No one, anywhere, can improve on nature, and the human body is the highest expression of creation" [LAJ].

Mary Creamer was a member of the National Association of Women Artists (NY), Pen and Brush (NY), the National League of American Pen Women (Washington D.C.), the Springfield Art Association, the Springfield Art League (Springfield MA), the California Arts Club (Los Angeles), American Institute of Fine Arts (Los Angeles), San Diego Art Association, and the Desert Art Center (Palm Springs CA). She was listed in the '60s editions of Who's Who in the Midwest and Who's Who of American Women [TN1].

NOTES:
[1] The painting is an o.o.c. still-life floral, 21 x 19 inches, s.l.l "Mary Creamer," with old label verso as follows: "Painted Feb. 1938. The Jonquils and sweat peas were a birthday gift from Addie Foote to the painter's sister Bernice King on her birthday, Feb. 14th 1938." This Bernice King (b. 14 February 1899) appears in the 1930 U.S. Census living in Oklahoma City as "sister-in-law" to head of household Charles P. "Cremer" and his wife Edna Cremer - the latter being her artist sister, aged 37 and born in Kentucky. In 1920, one finds Chas. P. Creamer (in some records wrongly transcribed "Oreamea") and wife Edna P. Creamer living in St. Louis MO. The Missouri Marriage Records show Charles P. "Craemer" marrying Edna P. King on 14 April 1914 in Clayton, St. Louis Co., MO. In 1910, Edna P. King (age 17, born Kentucky) is listed as a lodger in the residence of the Elijah Burgess family in St. Louis, working as a "seamstress" in the "dressmaking" trade; the same year's census, recorded some weeks later in Marion Co, IN, lists Mary P. King (age 17, born Kentucky) and Bernice King as daughters of the divorced dressmaker Leona McGinnis. (Leona L. Weldon had first married James Robert King on 18 December 1883; the divorced Leona King later married William McGinnis on 17 June 1906.)

[2] The membership roster for the California Art Club (Los Angeles, CA, established 1909: listing at http://216.247.8.57/history/history_cacpastmem_a-d.shtml) shows the artist as "Mary (Lacey) Creamer," but no evidence of 'Lacey' has been traced in any public or private records to date. It is unclear when the artist began using the first name of 'Mary' (her grandmother's name on her mother's side) instead of 'Edna'; her listing as 'Mary' in 1910 suggests that it may have been in use then - perhaps informally, since she is listed as 'Edna' on marriage records in 1914 and again in the 1920 U.S. Census.

[3] See Missouri Marriage Records, cited in note 1 above; the year is confirmed by the report of 29 August 1964 that the artist Mary Creamer and her husband ("Charles", in [TN2]) had just "celebrated their golden wedding anniversary" two weeks previous, before she commenced teaching that autumn at the Nevada Art Gallery [REG2].

[4] "Kentucky born, she studied at Washington University, St. Louis and at the University of Oklahoma, Norman" [TN1]. While the order of that sequence (Washington University, University of Oklahoma) is not definitive, the years in which the artist is recorded as living in St. Louis, MO - i.e. 1910 at age 17 prior to her marriage, and 1920 following her marriage - are known to precede the years in which she is recorded living in Oklahoma. "Released from the hospital after two months of danger, and still far from full recovery, she lost no time in embarking, as a freshman in the school of Art at Oklahoma University. Her talent, determination and sheer hard work carried her to eventual success" [LAJ].

[5] Genoa Morris, a minor painter (exhibiting in the 1939 Association of Oklahoma Artists exhibition in Oklahoma City), is perhaps better remembered for her book of poetry And Now to Avalon (C. L. Anderson, 1952).

[6] Creamer "began painting in Taos in the early 30's, returning summer after summer from Oklahoma City" [TN1]; in 1941 The Santa Fe New Mexican reports "Mrs. Mary Creamer, a painter of Oklahoma City, is spending a few weeks in town" [SFN].

[7] Thus reported in [LAJ]; the painting is un-located, as is to date any record of the venues in which it was exhibited. An oil painting with reported title The Land of Nod, featuring a group of children in their night-clothes strewn along an innocent grassy landscape, was in 1927 reproduced as a black-and-white lithograph by the Curtis Publishing Company, courtesy of the Edward Gross Co., New York, as an illustration for a children's story: I have not been able to discover if Creamer painted this picture. (Browne was herself, early in her career, an illustrator; later she come to share with Creamer the misfortune of serious medical challenge - both of her arms and legs seriously injured when hit by a car in Boston, in December of 1945: see Martha Oaks, "Margaret Fitzhugh Browne: 60 Years of Portrait Painting," American Art Review 23 [2011], 94-99, 128.)

[8] That Creamer may have known Foster from NY days is suggested in various reports of her teachers or those from whom "she enjoyed the encouragement and personal guidance" - in all such reports "with…Will Foster, New York and Los Angeles" (see [TN1] and [LAJ]); likewise Creamer reported working "[with]…Nell Foster, Carmel"