Emily Groom

Artist Biography:

(1876, Wayland, Mass. – 1975, Milwaukee, WI)

Once described as “the most prominent woman painter of the early artist group” by Porter Butts (former Director of the UW’s Wisconsin Union), Emily Groom boasted a career filled with local and national recognition in the form of awards and noted exhibitions.

Groom studied art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts under Edmund Tarbull, Art Institute of Chicago with John Vanderpeol, Art Students League in NY with Birge Harrison, and in London with Frank Brangwyn.

Groom organized the art department, as well as taught undergraduate and extension classes at the Milwaukee Downer College from 1901/2 to 1917 and again from 1935 to 1957. She also taught at the Layton School of Art. During her almost twenty-year stint from teaching, Groom turned her attention full time to painting, exhibiting, and traveling.

Groom painted with oils, pastels, and watercolors, which she preferred to paint en plein air. Her early work is marked by a reflection of English artistic style. Her later work featured an impressionistic style and themes of familiar rural Wisconsin and international landscapes and also florals.

Among her greatest accolades, Groom received a gold medal from St. Paul Art Institute in Minnesota in 1917, first place at the New York Watercolor Club (1917), a solo show at the Milwaukee Art Institute (1925), and group shows at the National Academy in New York, NY (1917), Pennsylvania Academy of   the Fine Arts, Art Institute of Chicago (1946), and the Museum of Wisconsin Art (1997, 2000, 2001).

She was the co-founder of the Wisconsin Watercolor Society, member of the American Watercolor Society, Artists’ Equity, Chicago Gallery Association, Concord Art Association, National Association of Woman Painters and Sculptors, New York Watercolor Club, and Wisconsin Painters and Sculptors.

For a full list of exhibitions and awards see source: Museum of Wisconsin Art, http://www.wisconsinart.org/archives/artist/emily-parker-groom/profile-55.aspx.