In her landscapes and floral still lifes, Mary Clare Sherwood was an Impressionist through and through. She studied with some of the most noted impressionist artists and brought the style along with her when she arrived in the deep South.
Sherwood was born in Lyons in upstate New York not far from Rochester and Lake Ontario. She moved to New York City to study at the Art Students’ League with J. Alden Weir and William Merritt Chase, both plein-air painters, and with Kenyon Cox, a more academic artist who painted murals at the Library of Congress about the same time William de Leftwich Dodge was working there. Sherwood also spent time, most likely during the summer, in Woodstock, New York, where Birge Harrison conducted classes in landscapes for the League. No doubt influenced by her instructors, she continued her studies abroad, in Berlin with Curt Hermann and Conrad Fehr and in Paris with Edwin Scott, an expatriate American.
Around 1920 she moved to Vicksburg, Mississippi, where she took a position at the women-only All Saints Episcopal College, a school which resisted desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education. In addition, she seems to have offered private lessons or co-ed summer classes, since in 1938 Andrew Bucci studied with her while a teenager.
Sherwood’s Northern canvases—painted in Woodstock and near her birthplace in upstate New York—have earthier hues. Her Southern landscapes are fresh impressionistic depictions which often utilize that iconic vegetation, Spanish moss, beloved by many artists working in the region. She probably included these in exhibitions organized by the Southern States Art League and the Mississippi Art Association, and no doubt encountered Marie Hull who was active with both organizations.