Clara McDonald Williamson (1875 – 1976)

Dinner at May’s Boarding House, 1954, oil on Masonite, 16 x 24 inches, exhibited: Aunt Clara The Paintings of Clara McDonald Williamson, Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Fort Worth, TX, Oklahoma Art Center, Oklahoma City, OK, Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute, San Antonio, TX, and Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas, TX, 1966 – 67 (label verso), literature: 1) Vogel, Donald and Margaret, Aunt Clara The Paintings of Clara McDonald Williamson, University of Texas Press, Austin and London, 1966, p. 116, and 2) Achieving Recognition, American Fine Art Magazine, March/April, 2025, p. 77 (illustrated), provenance includes: Valley House Gallery, Dallas, TX (label verso) and John Draper, NY (label verso), presented in an original period frame. NB: Since the provenance includes the collection of John Draper of New York City and the date of this work is 1954, it is possible (perhaps even likely) that Dinner at May’s Boarding House was exhibited at Williamson’s solo exhibition at the Alan Gallery in New York in the same year. Press reports noted that more than half of the exhibited works were sold.

SOLD

Clara McDonald Williamson was Texas’ premier primitive artist of the mid-20th century.  Born on November 20, 1875, in Iredell, Texas, she did not begin painting until 1943 when she was sixty-eight years old. Until that time, she was a homemaker focused on quotidian chores and child-rearing.  After the death of her husband and despite initial discouragement from faculty members at Southern Methodist University, Williamson began studies at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. Her painting progressed quickly to the point that by 1945, she won prizes in local competitions. The following year, she exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York. From that time forward, Williamson’s work was widely exhibited and critically acclaimed. She had a one-person show at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Elisabet Ney Museum in 1948. Solo exhibitions followed at the Alan Gallery in New York in 1954 and at the Fifth Avenue Gallery in Fort Worth in 1964. In 1966-67, Dinner at May’s Boarding House was included in a major retrospective of Williamson’s work that traveled to the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Oklahoma Art Center, Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute, and the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. This exhibition was accompanied by a catalog, Aunt Clara The Paintings of Clara McDonald Williamson published by the University of Texas Press. Williamson’s paintings were also selected for group exhibitions including at the Dallas Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Terry Art Institute, University of Illinois, Smithsonian Institution, Baltimore Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Philbrook Museum, Tulsa, and Southern Methodist University.

Williamson’s paintings often recalled memories from her early life in Iredell, as well as early Waxahachie, Dallas, and places she had visited. Williamson also painted pictures from her imagination, dreams, and of mystical religious subjects. In 1954, the year Williamson painted Dinner at May’s Boarding House, Winifred Shields, art critic for The Kansas City Star, wrote, “Clara McDonald Williamson is a ‘natural painter,’ and almost entirely self-taught. Her pictures are done with painstaking care, an awesome devotion to detail with a nice feeling for color and design, and with more than a touch of humor.” In connection with the New York Alan Gallery exhibition in the same year, Art Digest addressed an obvious comparison by noting that Williamson “makes Grandma Moses look fussy and saccharine, with her rather sober colors and impressive geometrical organization . . . Everywhere the sentiment is delicate and ingenious; Clara McDonald Williamson is a genuine discovery.”

Williamson lived in Texas until her death at one hundred years of age in 1976 and she produced only one hundred and sixty or so paintings. Williamson’s work is in the permanent collections of the Amon Carter Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and the Wichita Art Museum, among others. She is listed in Who Was Who in American Art and other standard references.