Mary Nicholena MacCord (1864-1955)

Mary Nicholena MacCord (1864-1955)

Born in 1864 to a successful Bridgeport, Connecticut, merchant, Mary Nicholena MacCord did not make her professional artist’s debut until 1915, when she submitted an Italian landscape to the annual exhibition of the Art Institute of Chicago. This was followed one year later by her inaugural participation in the annuals of the National Academy of Design in New York and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and she continued showing her work at all three venues well into the 1920s. She also exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, joined and showed with the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors, and became a member of several watercolor organizations, including the American Watercolor Society, the New York Water Color Club, the Washington Watercolor Club, and the Baltimore Water Color Club, which awarded her a prize in 1923.

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Very little has been discovered about her fine arts education, yet MacCord enjoyed a successful painting career working in both oil and watercolor and was lauded for her keen sense of design and use of color. While figural and still life subjects comprise a part of her oeuvre, her attention was primarily focused on landscapes inspired both by her trips abroad, where she explored England, France, and Italy, as well as her stays at the artists’ colonies at Boothbay Harbor, Maine and dotting the North Shore of Massachusetts. The charming towns of the latter, namely Gloucester, Rockport, and nearby Marblehead located twenty miles south, seem to have been especially fruitful in providing ample material for her brush, as noted by Rockport native William Lester Stevens, who called MacCord “one of the best-known women painters, [who] found the old houses attractive here.” [1] She also participated in exhibitions at North Shore arts venues, including a 1919 show at Gloucester’s Gallery-on-the-Moors and the inaugural exhibition of the Rockport Art Association in 1921.

MacCord never married and divided her time between New York City and Bridgeport, Connecticut, residing at the latter with her brother Charles, who was also an artist and likewise remained a bachelor until his passing in 1923. He left his entire estate to Mary, and when she passed away in 1955, she established a fund in her brother’s name at the Salmagundi Club to aid “sick, needy and disabled artists”[2] and left the rest of her estate to several Bridgeport charities. Her strong ties to the Bridgeport community included her membership in the town’s Art League and its Wednesday Morning Club, a literary group that met weekly and had members give talks on various art-related subjects. Interestingly, and as a reflection of her feeling of kinship with other women artists of her time, MacCord’s lecture in April of 1917 focused on Cecilia Beaux, Violet Oakley, Mary Cassatt, Harriet Hosmer, Janet Scuffer, and Bessie Potter Vonnoh.[3]


[1] “Rockport, Massachusetts, The Coming Summer Art Colony in America.” W. Lester Stevens, North Shore Breeze and Reminder, April 28, 192[?], p. 13

[2] The fund was called the Charles William MacCord fund. See “Artist, 91, Wills Cash to Charities.” Post (Bridgeport, Conn.) 6 August 1955.

[3] The Bridgeport Evening Farmer, September 1, 1916, p. 7

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