Mabel Dwight (U.S.A 1876–1955)

Mabel Dwight studied art at the Hopkins Art School in San Francisco, but made her career in New York, where she depicted city life in prints and paintings. She worked for the New York WPA between 1935 and 1939. Dwight's style hardly put her in a class by herself, and it is well known that many artists used the medium of lithographs as a method of personal expression . Dwight used her works to show social differences and the discrepancy between the rich and poor.  Her works however, are always elaborate and exhibited a greater technical mastery in that the method is more difficult. 

The views of life she portrays are not always charming, but one is tempted to say, they are full of beauty.  There are hastening crowds, and despite the somewhat dark and dismal lives sometimes captured, there is an atmosphere enveloping each of the aromas as with a filmy cloak - the harmony and sweetness of the tone, and the crisp precision of the line melting into tenderness and losing itself in translucent shadow, all this is Dwight at her best.  Curiously, unlike many of her male contemporaries, Dwight was passionate for a compassionate portrayal of the less fortunate in life.  Dwight developed the lithographic process to create softly shaded compositions with lighter backgrounds for contrast.

Dwight often chose dusk or shaded light, but in many of her works the shadows, instead of deepening, are lifting and the light is veiled by a mist or veil.  It would be difficult to imagine anything more sensitively rendered or more compassionate in character than her portraits of life.  The portraits form a series by themselves, vigorous characterizations, neither idealized nor forced into the picturesque or chocolate box.  They are instead images that are constructed with distinction and drawn with a sureness and understanding that showed us both a masterful artist and a person caring about the the world she observed about her. 

To an artist of Dwight's temperament, infinitely patient in art, the slightness of a medium appears to be only an incentive to greater effort.  Industry in art is a necessity, not a virtue, and any evidence of the same in the production is a blemish, not a quality.  The intense vitality in these images, with the air of being photos capturing a moment in history, show they must have taxed Dwight's powers as an artist to as great an extent as her paintings.