Sarah McPherson

American (1894-1978)

Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1894, McPherson spent the early 1920s in Paris, where she studied at the Academie Julian and the Atelier de la Grande Chaumiere. Back in New York City, where she was known as a bohemian artist in the Greenwich Village group which included Rockwell Kent and Edna St. Vincent Millay, McPherson studied with Robert Henri and Homer Boss, and was the subject of a series of photographs by Man Ray.

McPherson exhibited her works at the Society of Independent Artists in 1917-21, 1923-32 and in 1935, but became most well-known and loved for her neo-primitive miniature watercolors depicting scenes on Monhegan Island, Maine. McPherson first visited Monhegan in 1928 and summered there for over 40 years. On the island, McPherson often hung her watercolors on a clothesline behind the Periwinkle, selling them for a few dollars each.