Mary Ann Willson

Mary Ann Willson (active approximately 1810 to 1825) was an American folk artist based in Greene County, New York. She was unknown until 1943, when a portfolio of her work was discovered by staff at the Harry Stone Gallery in New York City. According to art historian Jean Lipman, Willson and her contemporary Eunice Pinney of Connecticut are considered two of the earliest American painters to work in the medium of watercolor.

Little is known about the artist. What information is available is derived from two anonymous letters, one of which accompanied the portfolio acquired by the Harry Stone Gallery, and a short biography included in Richard Lionel De Lisser's Picturesque Catskills, Greene County, which was first published in 1894. Because both letters contain a reference to the artists Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand and Daniel Huntington describing them as "modern" painters, they have been dated to the mid-nineteenth century. According to these documents, Miss Willson and her "friend," Miss Brundage (also spelled Brundidge), left Connecticut in about 1810 to settle in the town of Greenville, Green County, New York. The couple purchased a few acres, built a log cabin and, apparently with the aid of her neighbors, Brundage farmed the land while Willson painted pictures, "which she sold to the farmers and others as rare and unique works of art." According to the two letters, her work was purchased by patrons from Canada to Mobile, Alabama. The author of these letters has been tentatively identified by De Lisser and Greene County historian Mabel Parker Smith as Theodore L. Prevost, a cousin of the artist Thomas Cole by marriage; the art historian N. F. Karlins, however, has suggested that Theodore Alexander Cole, the son of the artist and owner of two of Willson's watercolors, composed the letters.

Stylistically, Willson's paintings are the work of an untrained hand. Her subjects are taken from popular prints of the day and are executed in bright colors made from berry juice, vegetable dye or brick dust. Her surviving oeuvre is small: in 1976, Karlins published a checklist of her known watercolors, which numbered twenty-two.

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