©Public Domain
Known as the “Dean of Women Illustrators,” Mary Hallock Foote was born into a New York family of Quaker farmers. She received her art training at the New York Cooper School of Design for Women, the only school in the 1860s with an adequate art curriculum for women. Many of her illustrations and stories for the major magazines were based on her experiences living in the American West with her engineer husband. This artwork, The Hill Pastures (Two Horses) published in 1889, was an illustration for
The Century Magazine. It was exhibited in the East Gallery of the Women's Building in the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. One of the few women jurors at the Exposition, Foote juried the chalk, charcoal, pastel, and other drawings category.
