Eva Auld Watson Biography

Eva Auld Watson

American

1889-1948

Biography

Eva Auld Watson (née Eva Auld), painter, printmaker, muralist, and illustrator, was born in Bandera, Texas in 1889. She spent her first nine years on her father's cattle ranch before her family moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As a young woman, Eva studied with Martin B. Leisser at the Pittsburgh School of Design for Women and later with Ernest W. Watson at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Eva Auld and Ernest Watson married in 1911. The Watsons spent summers in the Berkshire Hills in Massachusetts and, in 1915, Ernest co-founded the Berkshire Summer School of Art in Monterey, Massachusetts. Greywold, their summer home in Monterey was also their studio where they printed and sold their block prints.

Eva preferred working in linoleum and became proficient at printing a series of blocks or using the split fountain technique to print more than one color on a block. She pursued her own path as an illustrator and muralist. She illustrated Priscilla Holton’s Chuck Martinez, which was published in 1940 by Longmans, Green and Company. According to her family history, many churches were graced with her murals.

Eva Auld Watson’s work earned an Honorable Mention at the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. In October 1931, the Indianapolis Museum of Art mounted the exhibition Color Prints by Ernest and Eva Auld Watson. The following December this exhibition was featured at the U.S. National Museum, Smithsonian Institute, in Washington, D.C. She was a member of the American Federation of Arts, the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts, and the California Print Makers. Her work is in the collections of the Fitzwillliam Museum, Cambridge, United Kingdom; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota; the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Eva Auld Watson died in New York City on December 16, 1948.