Died 1981 | ||
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Books Bartlett's Harbor Artists' Colony: North Haven, Maine, Summer 2012 People also search for Frank Weston Benson, Frederick Warren Allen, Christina B. Abbott, Bela Pratt | ||
Beatrice Whitney Van Ness (1888–1981) was an American painter.
Born Beatrice Whitney in Chelsea, Massachusetts, Van Ness studied with Frank Weston Benson, Bela Lyon Pratt, Philip Hale, and Edmund Charles Tarbell, among others. Formerly a pupil at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, she received a scholarship from that organization in 1908 and joined its faculty two years later. Around 1909 she took summer classes with Charles H. Woodbury, who would go on to become a mentor for many years. Whitney had an early success with Odalisque, shown at the National Academy of Design in 1914, which won awards both there and at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition and was later bought by William Merritt Chase. In 1921 she founded the art department of Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill, remaining on its faculty until 1949 and studying the application of child and adolescent behavior to education practice. She married businessman Carl N. Van Ness in 1915, and with him summered in Ogunquit and North Haven, Maine; the couple had two daughters. Van Ness died in Brookline, Massachusetts.
The Beaver Country Day School has founded the Beatrice Van Ness Society in the painter's memory, and her papers are held by the Archives of American Art. A portrait by her of Bela Lyon Pratt is in the collection of the National Academy of Design; her work is also owned by the National Museum of Women in the Arts.