Marian MacDowell

Artist Info

Marian MacDowellNew York, 1857 - 1956

MacDowell, Marian Griswold Nevins (22 Nov. 1857-23 Aug. 1956), founder and supporter of the MacDowell Colony, was born in New York City, the daughter of David N. Nevins (occupation unknown) and Cornelia Leonard Perkins. When she was ten years old, her mother died, and her father moved his four children to Waterford, Connecticut. There, Marian took piano lessons from her aunt, Mrs. Roger Perkins. At eighteen, she traveled to Frankfurt, Germany, to study music with renowned pianist Clara Schumann. Upon learning that she would first have to spend a year under the tutelage of Clara's daughter, Marian opted instead for instruction at the Darmstadt Conservatory, under American composer Edward MacDowell. They married in 1884 in Waterford. Upon inheriting $5,000, she abandoned her own musical career to support her husband's ambitions as a composer. They lived in Wiesbaden (1884-1888), Boston (1888-1896), and New York City (1896-1904), where he headed Columbia University's music department. During vacations they retreated to an eighty-acre summer home in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Edward resigned from Columbia over differences over music training with President Nicholas Murray Butler and soon fell ill with a sickness, generally reported to be an obscure incurable brain disease, that would take his life in 1908.

Edward's musical friends in New York City established a fund for Marian's support, even before she was widowed, but she applied the money to establish the MacDowell Association. In memory of her husband, she established an artists' colony on the New Hampshire property, for the use of American writers, visual artists, and composers. Here, she hoped, the artists could withdraw from worldly concerns to concentrate on their creative work. Over the next forty years, she would tour the country, playing four hundred concerts of her husband's compositions, to raise $100,000 to expand the colony; she did this despite a lifelong series of back injuries that sometimes left her bedridden or on crutches for long periods of time. She was particularly successful at winning financial support from women's music clubs affiliated with the National Federation of Music Clubs. By the time of Marian MacDowell's death, the MacDowell Colony consisted of six hundred acres of land with thirty-three buildings, mostly studios in which artists could work for the summer, uninterrupted even by meals, which were delivered to their cottage doorsteps. After a hard day's work, colonists were invited to congregate for conversation and a sharing of their work; on Sundays, MacDowell invited them to her home for dinner.

The first two colonists came in 1908, writer Mary Mears and sculptor Helen Farnsworth Mears. By 1923, three hundred applicants competed for fifty awards, and many colonists distinguished themselves by winning Pulitzer Prizes for their efforts, including composer Aaron Copland and writers Willa Cather, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Thornton Wilder. Among other colonists were composers Mabel Daniels, Amy Beach, Roy Harris, and Lukas Foss and writers Elinor Wylie and Stephen Vincent Benét. MacDowell enjoyed acclaim in her lifetime for her efforts. She received several honorary degrees and a $5,000 prize in 1925 from the Pictorial Review "for the most distinctive achievement through individual effort in the field of art, industry, literature, music, drama, education, science or sociology," a sum that paid some colony debts. (Finances were a regular headache, for the colony constantly expanded in acreage and the physical plant was improved.) In her later years, she wintered in Los Angeles with companion Nina Maud Richardson, and she died there. She was buried at the colony alongside her husband.

MacDowell's greatest contribution to the MacDowell Colony was as a fundraiser, but she also socialized with the creators selected to come there and made every effort to attend to their particular needs, determined to make their visit productive, comfortable, and congenial. Her tenacity at establishing and developing a colony to facilitate the work of American men and women in the arts was a genuine contribution to the cultural life of the nation.

Bibliography

Marian MacDowell's papers and those of the MacDowell Colony are in the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. The Special Collections Department of the University of New Hampshire also has some material, mostly on the last years of her life. The MacDowell Colony has a small file on its history; Marian MacDowell wrote a personal account, The First Twenty Years of the MacDowell Colony: A Sketch (1951). See also Nancy McKee, Valiant Woman (1962); Gladys Livingston Graff, "The Most Outstanding American Woman," Lyre: The Magazine of Alpha Chi Omega 28 (Mar. 1925): 348-54; Jerome Beatty, "Pilot on the Glory Road," Reader's Digest, Oct. 1937, pp. 55-58; Robert Sabin, "MacDowell Colony Notables and Neighbors Honor Founder," Musical America, Sept. 1952, pp. 3, 23, 33-34; Rollo Walter Brown, "Mrs. MacDowell and Her Colony," Atlantic Monthly, July 1949, pp. 42-46; Ronald Eyer, "Great Lady of Music," Musical America, Sept. 1956, p. 5; and "Peterborough," American Magazine of Art 8 (Aug. 1917); 396-401. Obituaries are in Musical America, Sept. 1956, p. 32; the Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader, 25 Aug. 1956; and the New York Times and New York Tribune, 30 Aug. 1956.

Karen J. Blair

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Citation:

Karen J. Blair. "MacDowell, Marian Griswold Nevins";

http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-00950.html;

American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.

Access Date: Mon Aug 05 2013 16:38:02 GMT-0400 (Eastern Standard Time)