Last month, we introduced the Cooper family pocket watches from our permanent collection. Today, we would like to share portraits of the same family from around 1900. Those depicted are A.A. Cooper Sr., Mary Josephine Cooper, their son A.A. Cooper Jr., and his wife Georgia Bronson Hamilton. However, the Coopers themselves are not the focus of our spotlight, but rather, a celebrated portrait artist of the Midwest – Harriet Hutchinson Horton.
Syinda Harriet Hutchinson was born to a wheat merchant family in Prescott, Wisconsin around the end of the American Civil War. She went by a childhood nickname of “Hattie” and lived with her parents until adulthood. In 1887, she married Floyd Wallace Horton (1856-1935) of Winnebago, Illinois. As a young adult, Floyd had moved to St. Paul, Minnesota and opened a very successful business specializing in enlarging photographic portraits using crayons, inks, oils, and pastels. The couple married in Prescott and made their homebase in St. Paul.
At some point, the bride had dropped her birth name and instead went by “Harriet Hutchinson Horton.” She became a student of William Merritt Chase, an American painter known for portraits and directing the Shinnecock Hill Summer School of Art in New York. Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Hopper, and Charles Demuth all studied with Chase. Many of Chase’s hundreds of students were women who specialized in portraits as well. It is not clear when Harriet met her mentor. By 1902, Harriet was painting miniature portraits on ivory and porcelain as well as life-size pastel portraits by commission. She received orders across the Midwest (at the time called the “Northwest”) by prominent members of society. She worked both from life as well as from photographs.
The November 12, 1910 edition of the Rock Island Argus of Davenport, Iowa reported, "Mrs. Horton thoroughly believes in the artistic creed expressed by a critical writer in a contemporaneous publication - that the resemblance an artist should strive to express is the resemblance of the soul, which is the only resemblance that really matters, and that the eye of the painter should penetrate beyond the mask and help reveal the soulful qualities that lie within. It is this characteristic that makes Mrs. Horton's work distinctive in its fidelity to the minute details of portrait painting and which distinguishes it from that form of art that seeks only to produce the outline of the features."
Sifting through newspaper clippings reveals that Harriet traveled across the country, appearing in Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Indiana, and Washington, D.C. Many occasions she traveled by herself. Even though her husband Floyd also worked in the portrait business, it does not appear that Harriet was employed by the Horton Portrait Company. Instead, the 1910 census indicates that she worked “OA” – meaning she worked “on own account” rather than being an employer or employee. She had her own studio at Merriam Park, a neighborhood in St. Paul.
In 1922, Harriet Hutchinson Horton passed away after a long illness. She was buried in Prescott, Wisconsin, her hometown. She painted at least forty reported commissioned portraits within 20 years. The Quad-City Times declared in the January 21, 1912 paper that Mrs. Harriet Hutchinson Horton was “one of the most successful of American artists.” Yet, her portraits remain elusive, signed simply with “Horton.”
