Born: 15 December 1869, United States
Died: 13 January 1956
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Myra Jane Albert
The following is republished from HistoryLink.org, in line with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
The six founders of Women Painters of Washington were Myra Albert Wiggins (1869-1956), Elizabeth Warhanik (1880-1968), Lily Norling Hardwick (1890-1944), Dorothy Dolph Jensen (1895-1977), Anna B. Stone (1869-1950), and Helen Bebb (1878-1947), who acted as an administrator and was not an active painter.
The most renowned of the founders was painter/photographer Myra Albert Wiggins, who was probably the first internationally known artist from the Northwest. Wiggins had gained her reputation as a fine art photographer who became an associate member of Alfred Stieglitz’s exclusive Photo-Secession as well as London’s The Brotherhood of the Linked Ring as early as 1903.
She had started her career as a painter, having left her native Salem, Oregon, to study at the Art Students League of New York beginning in 1891. At the League she studied with some of the major artists of the period including William Merritt Chase (1849-1916), who exerted a lifelong influence. In photography, she was best known for her constructed Dutch figurative imagery that was inspired by Rembrandt (1606-1669) and Jan Vermeer (1632-1675). In painting, she concentrated on the still-life, often incorporating glass and metal objects in the manner of her mentor, Chase. By 1909 she had won more than 50 international awards in photography, but ceased her activity in that medium by the 1920s.
Wiggins moved to Washington state in 1907, settling first in Toppenish and finally in Seattle by 1932. She continued painting and was even active with the Public Works of Art Project in Seattle as an easel painter. Wiggins was esteemed in the Northwest art community, where she was known as the “Dean of Northwest Women Painters.” Her active and successful career culminated in a retrospective of her paintings and photography at the Seattle Art Museum in 1953.