About Mary Stewart

Mary Wilson Stewart was born in Indiana, PA in 1912. She was the middle child of three and was called Doddie. This nickname was attributed to the fact that her older brother, Jim, could not say the word Darling clearly. It came out Doddie and Doddie she stayed. Mary always said it was Dirty, because dirty she became once she discovered she could get free oil paints at her father’s hardware store.

They set up a stage in their basement and performed plays. One of their earliest productions was Washington crossing the Delaware, staring Jim as Washington with Mary and her sister, Ginnie, as patriots with paddles.

Probably Mary’s first major career decision was in choosing to go to Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon) instead of Vassar. At Tech she was popular, successful and recognized because of her obvious artistic talents. Mary was influenced by the Ashcan School of Art and many of her early drawings and paintings depicted the lives of people living in the mining towns around Indiana. She was influenced by the work of Robert Henri, John Sloan, William Glackens, George Luks and George Bellows who produced disturbing works portraying scenes of daily life, often in the city's poorer neighborhoods.

In the early years of World War II, after her famous brother became the first Hollywood star to enter the military, Mary Stewart was in New York City teaching at the Arts Student’s League. The war in Europe with the rise of Nazism and Fascism had a profound influence on her art. Mary felt that the real victims of all military arrogance were the youth. In her work she depicted the horrors to children that were taking place in Europe. Her art was influenced by but not derivative of the great German artist Kathe Kollwitz, whose work was suppressed by the Nazis. Mother and Child was a recurring theme in her work, ominous and disturbing.

After the war, she and her husband Robert Perry, a classmate of Jimmy Stewart at Princeton, moved to Bucks County, PA where she continued to paint, draw and teach, while raising four sons.