Author to Speak About Turn-of-the-Century Artist at 92nd St Y

New York, NY — In her latest book, Flower Diary: In Which Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries and Opens a Door (ECW Press, September 2021) author Molly Peacock weaves together elements of biography, memoir, and art history to reveal the world of Mary Hiester Reid. Now much forgotten, in her time Reid blazed a trail through the North American art scene, balancing a successful career as a painter as well as a marriage in the Edwardian age.

Born in Reading, PA, in 1854, Mary Hiester Reid was determined to be a painter and left behind women’s design schools to enter the art world of men. From 1883 to 1885, she studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where she met her future husband, Canadian artist George Agnew Reid. Throughout her career, she created more than 300 stunning still life paintings and landscapes and was well-known among the titans of America’s Arts and Crafts movement.

Yet sadly, almost 100 years after her death on Oct. 4, 1921, her work is largely forgotten. Thanks to Peacock’s new biography — and a recent exhibition at the AGO in Toronto — this extraordinary artist’s life and work can be remembered for generations to come.

Peacock will be speaking about her new book at two upcoming virtual events:

• Sept. 28 at 4 p.m. EDT Peacock, Georgiana Uhlyarik of the Art Gallery of Ontario, and Kathleen A. Foster of the Philadelphia Museum of Art will discuss Mary Hiester Reid. The event is free and open to the public but registration is required.
  
• Oct. 15 at 2:30pm EDT Hosted by the 92nd Street Y
  https://www.92y.org/

In this sumptuous and precisely researched biography, Peacock travels in Reid’s footsteps, visiting many of the locations where Reid and her husband stopped on their five tours of Europe, to their home near Toronto, and her studio in Tannersville, NY, in the Catskills.

“In prose as subtle and enchanting as Mary Hiester Reid’s own brushstrokes, Flower Diary paints a compelling portrait of a talented and unjustly neglected painter,” said Ross King, author of Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies. “Molly Peacock is unfailingly sensitive and intelligent, and at times deeply moving, as she shows how, despite the shade of domestic life and the unfavourable climate of the times, MHR brought forth her bright blossoms.”

Reid left slender written records; rather, her art became her diary and Flower Diary unfolds with an artwork for each episode of her life. The book chronicles how Reid enjoyed a rich, if sometimes difficult, marriage, how she coped with a younger rival, exhibited internationally, and became well-reviewed. She studied in Paris, traveled in Spain, and divided her time between Canada and the United States.

Peacock brings Mary Hiester Reid, foremother of painters such as Georgia O’Keefe, out of the shadows, revealing a fascinating, complex woman who insisted on her right to live as a married artist, not as a tragic heroine. Peacock uses her poet’s skill to create a structurally inventive portrait of this extraordinary woman whom modernism almost swept aside, weaving threads of her own marriage with Hiester Reid’s, following the history of empathy and examining how women manage the demands of creativity and domesticity, coping with relationships, stoves, and steamships, too. How do you make room for art when you must go to the market to buy a chicken for dinner? Hiester Reid had her answers, as Peacock gloriously discovers.

In addition to this book, Peacock is the author of The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72, seven volumes of poetry, including The Analyst: Poems, and the memoir Paradise, Piece by Piece. She is co-creator of Poetry in Motion on the New York City subways and buses, and the founder of The Best Canadian Poetry series. A dual Canadian/American citizen, Peacock lives in Toronto.