NEW YORK, NY.- Impressionist painter Mary Rogers Williams (1857-1907), renowned in her lifetime for exhibiting works from Paris to Indianapolis, left a legacy of portraits, landscapes and writings that ended up stored away in a Connecticut boathouse until 2012. Eve M. Kahn, the former Antiques columnist for The New York Times, has harvested Williams’s rediscovered artworks and archive for a new biography, Forever Seeing New Beauties: The Forgotten Impressionist Mary Rogers Williams, 1857-1907 (Wesleyan University Press). In Kahn’s book tour, she will lecture October 6, 2 pm, at the Portland Historical Society in Connecticut, and October 27 at 2 pm at the Boston International Fine Art Show.

Mary Williams, a baker’s daughter from Hartford, Connecticut, trained at the Art Students League and with artists including James McNeill Whistler. Starting in 1888, she ran Smith College’s art department and, in every spare moment, traveled in Europe. While biking and hiking from the Arctic Circle to Naples, she sent home witty letters detailing spectacular passing landscapes, political scandals, religious processions, befuddled Americans abroad and art world rules that favored men.

Kahn’s book luminously reproduces Williams’s under-appreciated paintings, with foresightedly proto-modernist wispy brushstrokes. Williams captured pensive gowned women, Norwegian slopes reflected in icy waters, saw-tooth rooflines on French chateaus, and incense hazes in Italian chapels. Kahn also offers a vivid portrayal of Williams’s equally adventurous friends, who defied their era's expectations for women intellectuals.

Kahn explains, “I’ve never tired of telling people about Mary's accomplishments and feistiness and the flukes of fate that led me to her papers and paintings and to families of people who knew her.”

Reviewers of the book have included Professor Katherine Manthorne of CUNY, who calls it a “must-read.” Amy Kurtz Lansing, curator at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut, has described the book as “at long last bringing this vivid woman the attention she deserves.”

Kahn’s study is part of a wave of recent rediscoveries of late 19th and early 20th century women artists. “Since I’ve been on Mary’s trail,” Kahn says, “it’s been so rewarding to see her contemporaries like Ida O’Keeffe, Agnes Pelton, Jane Peterson and Maud Knowlton get their due. I’ve been called ‘a resurrectionist,’ and I love being part of a growing circle taking on that title.”