Born: 5 December 1907, United States
Died: 13 May 2004
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Yvonne Twining
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.
In 1943, Boston WPA artist Yvonne Twining Humber (1907-2004) relocated with her new husband to Seattle. She had achieved a measure of success in exhibitions associated with the Federal Art Projects, which had employed her as an easel painter from the inception of the PWAP in 1933 through its demise in 1943. Humber worked primarily in oil and brought a hard-edged realism that was uncommon in the Northwest. Her style of Formalist Realism united influences of the Italian Primitives with the naïve or folk painters of her native New England.
Humber had attended the National Academy of Design and Art Students League in New York, as well as working in Provincetown with Charles Hawthorne (1872–1930) for two summers. She won two consecutive Tiffany Foundation Fellowships in 1933 and 1934. Humber had a successful solo exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum in 1946 and resumed exhibiting nationally and attained a significant reputation in Seattle as a painter and teacher.
After a series of unfortunate tragedies beginning with the death of her husband in 1960, Humber ceased painting to recover her emotional and financial stability. When the public’s renewed interest in the WPA began in the 1970s, Humber resumed painting and worked into her 90s. In 2001, she endowed the Twining-Humber Award for Seattle’s Artist Trust, which gives a yearly Lifetime Achievement award of $10,000 to a Washington state female artist over the age of 60.