Ella Marie Koepke Mewhinney (Texas, 1891-1975), bluebonnet landscape, oil on canvas, signed lower left

sight: 14 x 18 in., frame: 17 x 21 in.

Provenance: Property from a Texas Hill Country collector

Ella Marie Koepke Mewhinney was born in Nelsonville, Texas and reared in Bartlett, Texas. At age seventeen, she was a student of Mary A. Bishop at Texas Presbyterian College, Milford, from which Mewhinney received a baccalaureate in 1910. She taught afterward in Bartlett and Granger. In the summer of 1911 she studied flower and china painting under Kathryn E. Cherry and still-life and landscape painting under Frank L. Phoenix in St. Louis. In 1913, Mewhinney moved back to Texas before departing again to Chicago and later to New York in 1919. There, she spent six weeks at the Art Students League of New York and studied under George Brandt Bridgeman and sketched with Hans Peter Hansen.