Constance Richardson

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American painter, many of whose works are concerned with the effects of light on the figure and on the landscape. She painted portraits and genre scenes in addition to landscapes; her work has been described as reminiscent of Edward Hopper. She exhibited widely and received numerous prizes. The daughter of Christopher B. Coleman, secretary of the Indiana Historical Society and professor of history at Butler College, she grew up in the Irvington neighborhood of Indianapolis. She graduated from Laurel School in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and attended Vassar College for two years before transferring to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she studied from 1925 until 1928. It was there that she met her future husband, Edgar Preston Richardson, a student of painting who later became an art historian. From 1928 to 1930 Richardson lived in Indianapolis, then in Detroit from 1931-1962 while Edgar worked at Detroit Institute of Arts, where he served as assistant director from 1933-1945, and as director from 1945-1962. Her first landscapes date to the Summers the couple spent in Vermont and New York; she later worked along the Great Lakes before discovering the West, and many of her later works were painted in Wyoming. Richardson relocated with her husband to Delaware in 1962 when he became director of the Winterthur Museum. In 1985 she was living in Philadelphia. Richardson's 1930 painting Street Light, owned by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, was included in the inaugural exhibition of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, American Women Artists 1830–1930, in 1987. Constance Coleman Richardson died on 14 February 2002, aged 97, in Philadelphia. Link to Wikipedia biography