Ida Isabella Poteat

Ida Isabella Poteat (December 15, 1858 – February 1, 1940) was an American player and instructor.

Poteat was born at Forest Home in Caswell County, North Carolina, near the community of Yanceyville. She was the daughter of James and Julia A. McNeill Poteat; her siblings included William Louis Poteat, and through her niece Helen she was for a period the aunt-in-law of Laurence Stallings. She was with the great-aunt of philosopher William H. Poteat. Her ahead of time education came in local schools past she went to the Raleigh Female Seminary. She then traveled to New York City, studying at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts and the Cooper Union and having lessons at the School of Applied Design in Philadelphia. She was a private pupil of William Merritt Chase, and next studied when Robert Henri, Charles Parsons, and Louis Mounier during her career. She moreover spent several summers abroad, studying at various become old in London, Florence, Venice, and Carcassonne.

Poteat first worked at the Oxford Seminary in Oxford, North Carolina, but she associated the talent of the Baptist Female University, today Meredith College, in Raleigh upon its opening on September 27, 1899. She remained there until her death greater than forty years later. She turned the art department into one of the most deeply regarded in the southern United States, modeling its curriculum on those of schools in New York, Philadelphia, and Paris. Among her pupils at Meredith was painter Francis Speight; others intensify Mary Tillery, Ethel Parrot Hughes, Lucy Sanders Hood, Mrs. Herbert Peele, Heslope Purefoy, Dorothy Horne Decker, and Effie Raye Calhoun Bateman Goff. Poteat meant costumes for the faculty's quadrennial production of Alice in Wonderland; she also designed the academic circles seal, adopted in 1909.

Poteat was a devout devotee of the Baptist Church. She never married. After her father's death her mommy came to live considering her; the two would frequently visit her brother William at Wake Forest University during his presidency. On her death she was buried in the relations cemetery close Yanceyville.

A portrait of Poteat, done by her pupil Mary Tillery and presented to Meredith College by a intervention of alumnae in 1938, hung in the dormitory Poteat Hall until 1995, when it was destroyed by vandalism. She was then memorialized afterward a magnolia tree upon campus and behind the commencement of the Poteat Scholarship. She is among the artists represented in the North Carolina Women Artists Archive at the library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.