Isabelle Sprague Smith

Isabelle Sprague Smith, also Isabelle Dwight Sprague Smith (November 11, 1861–December 28, 1950) was an American artist, teacher, and school principal until the mid-1920s. Her students donated the Isabelle D. Sprague Smith Studio to the MacDowell Colony, where she was a member, by 1918. She was director of the People's Institute of New York. Sprague Smith was president of the Bach Festival in New York, and the founder of the Bach Festival in Winter Park, Florida in 1935.

Isabelle Dwight was born on November 11, 1861 in Clinton, New York, the daughter of Benjamin W. Dwight and Wealthy J. Dewey Dwight. Her uncle was Theodore William Dwight, the head of Columbia Law School, and her great-grandfather was Timothy Dwight IV, was the president of Yale University and before that was chaplain of General Samuel Holden Parsons's brigade during the Revolutionary War. She attended Dwight School in Clinton, in which her father was the founder and principal, and then studied art at the Art Students League of New York and in Paris.

She married Charles Sprague Smith, a Columbia University professor and a social progressive, on November 11, 1884 in Clinton, New York. They had a daughter, Hilda, on September 18, 1885, and lived at 29 W. 68th Street in Manhattan beginning by 1903. The Sprague Smiths were on the New York Social Register. Charles was seriously ill with pneumonia and died on March 29 or 30 in 1910.

Hilda attended Velton School for Girls. She studied politics, history and economics and graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1909. On November 1, 1915, she married Victor Starzenski, the son of Polish Count Maurice and Countess Anna Starzenski. where he worked at General Electric as an engineer. She was back to Hilda Sprague Smith in 1929.

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