Contance Jenkins Macky, Mother and Twins, ca. 1918

CONSTANCE JENKINS MACKY

Mother and Twins, ca. 1918

Oil on canvas

Gift of the Artist through Albert M. Bender, 1925.51

Born in Victoria, Australia in 1883, Constance Lillian Jenkins was a significant Bay Area artist in the early twentieth century. In 1916, she and her husband Eric Spencer Macky founded the Spencer Macky Art School in San Francisco on Post Street in a building that housed many notable Bay Area artists including Clark Hobart, whose painting, The Tired Dancer, is included in this exhibition. By 1917, the school was popular enough that it moved to a larger building where it merged with the California School of Fine Arts. Today it is known as the San Francisco Art Institute. In addition to raising two sons, and teaching art classes with her husband, Macky established a successful career as a figure and portrait painter. Mother and Twins shows the sensitivity of a caring mother for her children and uses an Impressionistic style to portray the unseen labor of a turn-of-the-century homemaker.

—Susan Prier