Felicie Waldo Howell, born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1897, was a painter of oil and watercolor coastal landscapes, shore scenes, Impressionist figures in nature, interiors, and marine scenes. Howell’s early work was often interiors, and then she turned to landscape, shore scenes, and marine subjects.
She was also a teacher of painting at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art. Her first husband, George Mixter, was a yachtsman, and many of her marine scenes were painted along the New England coast with him aboard their schooner, “Teragram,” including a 1937 series of the America Cup Races.
By 1910, Howell had moved to Washington DC where she was living in her parents’ household, according to the 1910 census. Her father Warren E. Howell was a Seventh Day Adventist missionary and educator.
From 1910 to 1914, she studied at the Corcoran School of Art with E.C. Messer. Then she enrolled at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women in Pennsylvania and studied with Henry Snell. She was a member of many art organizations, and won many honors and awards. Howell belonged to the National Arts Club, New York Watercolor Club, Society of Painters of New York, and Painters and Sculptors Gallery Association in New York City, as well as the Concord Art Association, Massachusetts.
In 1922, she became an Associate of the National Academy of Design in New York City, and in 1945, a full Member. In 1916, Howell won a prize at an exhibition of the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors, and another in 1919 at the Concord Art Association.
The year 1921 was a big one for Howell in terms of winning prizes. She received a Hallgarten Prize at the National Academy of Design; a silver medal at the Society of Washington (D.C.) Artists, and another at the Washington (D.C.) Watercolor Club; and the Peabody Prize at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she exhibited in nineteen annual exhibitions as well as the same number at the Pennsylvania Academy.
Her work is in the collections of the National Gallery, Smithsonian Institution and Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and in New York City at the National Arts Club and Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Felicie Waldo Howell died in 1968.
Sources include: Jules and Nancy Heller, North American Women Artists of the 20th Century Paul Sternberg Sr., Art by American Women Peter Falk, Who Was Who in American Art Additional information provided by Marisa Bourgoin, Corcoran Gallery of Art
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