Orra White Hitchcock

"Orra White Hitchcock (1796-1863): An Amherst Woman of Art and Science" brings to light the little-known art of the Connecticut River Valley's first woman artist, Orra White Hitchcock, wife or Edward Hitchcock (1796-1864), geologist, theologian, professor and for a decade president of Amherst College. From about 1816 to 1850, Orra produced striking watercolors of native plants, picturesque lithographs of the Connecticut and Deerfield rivers, symbolic compositions, and drawings of prehistoric fossils as well as huge colored charts for her husband's lectures. She was a self-taught illustrator of remarkable gifts who renered mushrooms, grasses, and flowers with the exactness of a scientist and the lyrical beauty of a decorative artist. Exhibition curators Robert L. Herbert and Daria D'Arienzo have uncovered previously unknown drawings and many new facts that fill out the work and life of a singular woman who considered herself not an 'artist' but a mother, wife, and teacher who made illustrations. Elizabeth Farnsworth contributes an analysis or Orra's watercolors of flowers and grasses from the vantage point of her own work as a scientific illustrator. In another essay, geologist Tekla Harms shows how Orra's large classroom drawings supplemented observable phenomena with representations of unseen geological structures crucial to geologic education. The generously illustrated catalogue of this exhibition reveals the memorable art of gifted woman who was the principal female illustrator of her generation in America.