Biography
Alison Mason Kingsbury was born in Durham, NH in 1898. Her father, Albert Kingsbury, was a mechanical engineer. Her mother, Alison Mason Kingsburgy, was a New York socialite and an amateur painter. Kingsbury attended Wellesley College, where she studied art history and physics. She spent her summers in college doing drafting work for her father's company, the Kingsbury Machine Works.
After college Kingsbury moved to New York and studied at the Art Students League. Her teachers there included George Bridgman, a methodical teacher of anatomy, and F.V. DuMond, an American Impressionist. While studying, Kingsbury supported herself designing greeting cards. She also worked as an art instructor at Wellesley and studied architecture and mural design with Charles Howard Walker.
In 1922 Kingsbury traveled to France and enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Fountainebleau, where she studied fresco with Paul Albert Baudouin and sculpture and mural composition with Alfred Janniot. She followed Janniot to the French School in Rome, continuing her study of frescoes.
Returning to the United States, Kingsbury worked with the muralist Ezra Winter from 1924-1927. In 1925 she assisted Winter on his mural for Willard Straight Hall at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. Here she met Morris Bishop, who was teaching French and Italian at Cornell while working on his PhD. The couple was married in 1927 and spent the rest of their lives in Ithaca.
Kingsbury received a commission to paint a mural for the World War I Memorial Chapel at Cornell in 1930. Meanwhile she was working on regionalist oil paintings of the neighboring Finger Lakes region. In 1932 Kingsbury and Winter painted the mural "Fountain of Youth" for the Radio City Music Hall in New York. Her work was widely exhibited during the 1930s: five appearances at the Annual exhibit of the Pennsyvlania Academy of the Fine Arts between 1932 and 1940, an exhibit at the Salons of America in 1933, a show at the Ferargil Gallery in 1939, and a prize from the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors in 1939.
Kingsbury's Post Office mural for Canastota, NY, "The Onion Field," was completed in 1942. When her husband was sent overseas for the Office of War Information, she did some graphic work to support herself and her daughter - tedious tasks she did not enjoy. More pleasant was the production of a children's book The Adventures of Phunsi in 1946.
In the 1950s Kingsbury painted a mural for the Gannett Health Clinic at Cornell. She illustrated a number of books, including ones by her husband. And she was selected to illustrate the 1959 edition of the Fanny Farmer Cookbook.
Kingsbury's work was celebrated in a 1981 exhibit at Ithaca's Upstairs Gallery. From 1982-1987, when she felt she had lost the hand control needed for detailed painting, she worked in collage and cut paper, a medium she had first explored in 1967. She died in Ithaca in 1988.
Critical Analysis
For her entire career Kingsbury painted the world of her immediate surroundings. This meant a primary focus on landscapes - and the natural environment of upstate New York. She had a warm palette and a great eye for detail. The composition of her Canastota, NY Post Office mural is not too different from many of her easel paintings. It is somewhat more dramatic, with two strong figures prominent in the foreground, rows of onions spread across the width of the mural, and gently rolling hills in the background. The work's perspective suggests a vast landscape and implies a great deal of work for the couple in the foreground. Their figures are drawn to imply a strength capable of such work - a concept typical in Social Realist art of that era. In this regard the mural is more a nod to prevailing styles than most of Kingsbury's work, which tended to be more reserved in its presentation.
The long association that Kingsbury and her husband had with Cornell University led to the University having a massive collection of Kingsbury's work. This material has all been scanned and is available online through the University Library. Through this resource one can explore the varied media in which Kingsbury worked and the different styles that she explored in the course of her artistic career.
Murals
- Canastota, New York - Post Office: The Onion Fields
References
- Alison Mason Kingsbury (Wikipedia).
- Alison Mason Kingsbury: Life and Art (Digital Collections).
- The Art & Life of Alison Mason Kingsbury (Rare and Manuscript Collections).