Mary B Titcomb (1858-1927)

Mary Bradish Titcomb was an American painter, mainly of portraits and landscapes. She is often grouped with the American Impressionists. A native of Windham, New Hampshire, upon graduation from high school Titcomb studied at the Massachusetts Normal Art School before accepting a position as a drawing teacher in the public schools of Brockton, Massachusetts, where she remained for fourteen years before resigning, in 1889, to study painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Her instructors there included Edmund Charles Tarbell, Philip Leslie Hale, and Frank Weston Benson. In the 1890s she went to Paris to study with Jules Joseph Lefebvre and to travel. She then returned to Boston, taking studio space at the Harcourt Studios, where all three of her teachers kept space.

In 1895 she became a member of the Copley Society and began exhibiting locally; from 1904 to 1927 she showed work in 29 exhibits at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She began signing her name as “M. Bradish Titcomb” in 1905 to avoid prejudice against her gender.