Edith Mitchill Prellwitz

Place: South Orange

Born: 1865

Death: 1944

Biography:

Edith Mitchill Prellwitz was an American artist born in South Orange, United States in 1865 and died in 1944. She is known for her Impressionist and Tonalist studies of Peconic Bay, New York, as well as for figurative paintings with literary or mythical subjects. She studied art at the Art Students League and at the Académie Julien in Paris. She was one of the founding members of the Woman's Art Club of New York in 1889. She married the artist Henry Prellwitz in 1894 and had a son, Edwin. They moved to the north shore of Peconic Bay on Long Island in 1899, where they painted plein air paintings and worked in adjoining studios at High House, their Peconic Bay home. Prellwitz painted Impressionist and Tonalist waterscapes of Peconic Bay and allegorical figure paintings. She exhibited mainly on the east coast and at expositions like the St. Louis World's Fair, where she won a silver medal. She won the Third Hallgarten Prize from the National Academy of Design (NAD) in 1893 for The Prodigal Son, and her Venus won the Thomas B. Clarke Prize at the 1907 NAD exhibition for the best figure composition by an American citizen painted in the United States. Her work is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, the Parrish Art Museum, and other institutions.