Texas landscapist Emma Stockman Hendricks was born on September 1, 1868, in Suisun, California. She was only twelve when she attended the California School of Design in San Francisco, having moved to Napa Valley. In the 1880s, she studied with Sarah Campion at the Young Ladies Seminary and with Oxley Miller in Napa.
In New York City, before 1893, she studied at the National Academy of Design. In 1929, Hendricks took a summer session of study at the Broadmoor Art Academy, Colorado Springs, and worked with artists Jose Arpa and Adele Brunei of San Antonio and Dallas, respectively. She also attended the Santa Fe School of Art.
She married Harrison Hendricks in 1989, and the couple moved to Fort Worth, Texas.
In 1899, Hendricks won a prize at the California State Fair, Sacramento. Her best-known painting may be Palo Duro Canyon that was awarded first-prize, in 1927, at the Cotton Palace Exposition, Waco, Texas. Palo Duro Canyon is in the collection of the Amarillo Public Library. Some titles of Hendricks’s other paintings include Taos Pueblo, Santa Fe Creek, Spring in South Texas, Rio Grande Valley; Blue Bonnets of Texas, and Cimarron Canyon.
In 1921, she organized the Amarillo Art Association, serving as its president for many years. She exhibited with this group and at the Tri-State Fair, Amarillo; Texas State Fair, Dallas; Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe; Fort Worth Museum of Art; Southern States Art League; and Texas Tech Museum, Lubbock.
After sojourns in Fort Worth; a cattle ranch in 1898; and Miami, Texas, from 1905-1908, Hendricks moved to Amarillo, Texas, remaining there until 1936, except for a brief period, around 1933-1934, in Tucumcari, New Mexico.
The 1920s and 1930s, saw Hendricks spend nine summers in the art center of Taos, New Mexico. After a period in San Antonio, in the late 1940s, she made her final move to Natalia, Texas, where she died on March 10, 1959.
Source:
Phil Kovinick and Marian Yoshiki Kovinick, An Encyclopedia of Women Artists of the West
John and Deborah Powers, Texas Painters, Sculptors, and Graphic Artists
