Margaretta S. Hinchman (1876–1955): The Philadelphia Quaker Artist Who Painted Marian Anderson and the American Southwest

Among the most accomplished artists of the broader Hinchman family was Margaretta Shoemaker Hinchman (1876–1955) — a Philadelphia Quaker whose career as a painter, illustrator, sculptor, and photographer spanned more than half a century and left works in some of the most important collections in American art.

She was born on July 12, 1876, in Philadelphia, the daughter of Charles Shoemaker Hinchman and Lydia Swain Mitchell, into the same prominent Pennsylvania Quaker community that had produced generations of Hinchman family members since the family's earliest colonial settlements in the Delaware Valley. Her family connections ran deep into Philadelphia society: her mother, Lydia, later wrote Early Settlers of Nantucket: Their Associates and Descendants (1901), which Margaretta herself illustrated.

Education Under the Masters

Margaretta studied art in the late 1890s under a remarkable roster of teachers. The sculptor Charles Grafly taught her the three-dimensional arts. The celebrated illustrator Howard Pyle — whose students went on to define American illustration for a generation — shaped her graphic work. The Italian watercolorists Onorato Carlandi and Earl Horter refined her technique with transparent media. In New York, she studied under the muralist and figure painter Kenyon Cox, who developed her skills as a large-scale artist capable of ambitious public work.

The breadth of her training gave her a versatility rare even among accomplished artists — she could execute a delicate watercolor, a grand mural panel, a sculptural portrait, or a documentary photograph with equal facility.

World War I: Ambulance Driver and War Artist

When the United States entered World War I, Margaretta Hinchman did not simply volunteer for administrative work. She served as an ambulance driver in the war effort — a physically demanding and dangerous role that put her directly in the landscape of the conflict. At the same time, she contributed her artistic skills to the home front, painting posters for the U.S. Shipping Board and producing target paintings for Camp Dix (now Fort Dix, New Jersey).

The Philadelphia Sesquicentennial Panels

One of the most ambitious commissions of her career came in 1926, when the Sesqui-Centennial International Exposition in Philadelphia — celebrating 150 years of American independence — commissioned Margaretta to paint four large panels depicting Colonial American port views of Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and Charleston. The panels showed people in historically accurate 18th-century attire against period prints of the four cities, and were intended to educate visitors about early American life.

After the exhibition, the panels were displayed in a one-woman show before finding a permanent home at the Woodmere Art Museum. Their impact extended to the decorative arts: Birge & Co. of Buffalo, New York, used the panels as the basis for a wallpaper series installed in the historic Sweetbriar Mansion of Philadelphia — meaning Hinchman's images became part of the historic house itself. The four panels sold at auction in 2014 for $20,000.

Portrait of Marian Anderson — The Mary Smith Prize

Among her many honors, Margaretta twice won the Mary Smith Prize, awarded by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for the best painting in any medium by a woman artist. Her 1943 prize was awarded for her portrait of Marian Anderson — the great African American contralto who had famously sung on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 after being barred from performing at Constitution Hall. The portrait captured Anderson at the height of her fame, and the award was noted in the African-American press at the time.

The Navajo Portraits and the Penn Museum Bequest

Perhaps the most distinctive dimension of Margaretta's legacy is her work documenting Native American culture in the American Southwest. She traveled extensively in the region, producing gouache-on-paper portraits of Navajo individuals with the documentary precision and respectful attention of a serious ethnographic artist. Works such as "Portrait of a Navaho Woman: Hosteen Yashi Bitsoe (Daughter of Little Man)" exemplify her approach — individual, named, dignified.

Upon her death in 1955, she bequeathed 28 items to the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, including both her own work and objects by Native American artists from Navajo, Tesuque, Pueblo, and Zuni cultures, as well as pottery from Mexico. The bequest included works by Ma-Pe-Wi (Velino Shije Herrera), Tse-Ye-Mu, and other prominent Native artists of the era.

To the Philadelphia Museum of Art, she bequeathed works by other artists she had collected, including George Biddle, Clare Leighton, and Charles Sheeler. Her letterbooks (1922–1946) are preserved in the Quaker and Special Collections division of Haverford College's library, providing a primary source record of her life and professional relationships.

Margaretta Shoemaker Hinchman died in 1955, leaving behind collections in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Woodmere Art Museum, the Delaware Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Penn Museum. She was, in every sense, a Hinchman who left her name permanently in the cultural institutions of her city.