Margaret Foote Hawley

Margaret Spencer Foote Hawley (1880–1963) was an American painter of portrait miniatures.

Hawley and her sister, Mary Foote – also complex to become a painter – were born in Guilford, Connecticut, the daughters of Charles Spencer Foote (1837–1880) and Hannah Hubbard Foote (1840–1885). Orphaned at five, she was adopted by her aunt, Harriet Foote Hawley, and uncle, Joseph Roswell Hawley. Joseph was a supporter of the United States Senate, and Margaret went to live in the expose of the couple in Washington, D.C. There she attended public schools and the Corcoran School of Art, where she was awarded a gold medal for her animatronics drawing. She then took private lessons like Howard Helmick, and received instruction from William Merritt Chase. After graduation she taught at a girls' boarding school, saving up passable money to ensue Paris and spend two summers at the Académie Colarossi. She conventional training in the foundation of full-scale portraits, but soon found that she preferred the challenge of full of zip in miniature.

Almost immediately on the Begin of her career Hawley began to receive awards. Throughout her career, these included a medal of award from the Pennsylvania Society of Miniature Painters (1918); the Lea Prize from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1920); the Smith Memorial Prize of the Baltimore Watercolor Club (1925); a bronze medal at the Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia (1926); a medal of praise from the Brooklyn Society of Miniature Painters (1931); and a medal for best miniature from the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors (1931). She was elected president of the American Society of Miniature Painters in 1923, and was a regular fixture of its annual exhibits. She showed deed in London from 1926 until 1929, and was elected in 1927 to the Royal Miniature Society. From 1920 to 1963 she was a advocate of the Cosmopolitan Club.

Some four hundred miniatures by Hawley are known. Many are in private collections; among museums which retain her paintings are the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the arachnologist Alexander Petrunkevitch), the National Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum, and the Stowe-Day Foundation in Hartford. Her 1927 portrait of Natalie Shipman was included in the inaugural exhibition of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, American Women Artists 1830–1930, in 1987.

Hawley died in Midtown Hospital in New York City, in which city she had kept a studio for many years; she had other studio in Boston. Her only listed survivors were her sister and two stepsisters. She is buried in the Foote-Ward Cemetery in Guilford, Connecticut.

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