Adelaide Deming

Black and white reproduction of Pottery and Jade by Adelaide Deming

Adelaide Deming (1864–1956) was an American painter, associated for much of her life with Litchfield, Connecticut.

Born in Litchfield,[1] Deming was descended from a family with deep roots in the community.[2] She received much of her training in New York City, studying at the Art Students League of New York; her teachers included William Merritt Chase, William Lathrop, Henry B. Snow, and Arthur Wesley Dow. She taught at the Pratt Institute for eight years. She traveled widely in Europe, the Caribbean, and Egypt, but her best-known works were her New England landscapes, frequently depicting scenes from her hometown.[3] In 1915 she exhibited a group of paintings alongside pieces by Alice Schille, Helen Watson Phelps and Emma Lampert Cooper;[4] during her career she also showed at the National Academy of Design, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Brooklyn Museum, and she participated in the Panama Pacific Exposition in 1915.[3] Her watercolors won prizes in numerous exhibitions.[5][6][7] She was also active as a muralist.[8] She showed with other Connecticut artists, such as Emily Vanderpoel and Alexander Theobald Van Laer, and held memberships in a number of the state's art groups, including the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts, the Paint and Clay Club of New Haven, and the Kent Art Association. National affiliations included those with the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors and the American Watercolor Society. She was president of the local suffrage league in Litchfield, and served on the town board of education, in which role she helped to bring hot lunches to schools and to build a new school in the 1920s.[3]

A handful of Deming's letters have been digitized by the Archives of American Art.[1] Several of her paintings are owned by the Litchfield Historical Society, as are many of her papers, including correspondence with Booker T. Washington and Victor Hugo;[3] many of the paintings were donated to the Society by the artist herself.[9]

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