Chestnut, Corsica, Mary Huntoon

Archive Label 2003: Primarily remembered as a printmaker, Mary Huntoon was also an accomplished painter and pioneering art therapist. She graduated from Washburn University in Topeka in 1920, and that fall entered the Art Students League in New York. From there she was commissioned to make a series of etchings on Parisian life and lived in Paris from 1926 until 1930. While in Europe, Huntoon traveled to Corsica where she painted for a few months. In the painting here Huntoon used a modern approach to present the Corsican landscape, a cropped composition of somber earth-colored tree limbs boldly outlined in black that reach out to the viewer in front of drab-green hills. Huntoon fully developed her artistic style in Paris and by the time she left was recognized there as a promising young artist. When she returned to the United States, Huntoon taught at Washburn. In 1936 she was appointed director of the Federal Art Project in Kansas, part of President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration program.