“Graceful yet precise, poetic yet deeply rooted in research, this exploration of an overlooked painter is gorgeous — a joy to read. Molly Peacock’s insights and empathy with her subject bring to life both Mary Hiester Reid and her luscious flower paintings.” — Charlotte Gray, author of The Massey Murder

Molly Peacock uncovers the history of neglected painter Mary Hiester Reid, a trailblazing artist who refused to choose between marriage and a career.

Born into a patrician American family in the middle of the nineteenth century, Mary Hiester Reid was determined to be a painter and left behind women’s design schools to enter the art world of men. After she married fellow artist George Reid, she returned with him to his home country of Canada. There she set about creating over 300 stunning still life and landscape paintings, inhabiting a rich, if sometimes difficult, marriage, coping with a younger rival, exhibiting internationally, and becoming well-reviewed. She studied in Paris, traveled in Spain, and divided her time between Canada and the United States where she lived among America’s Arts and Crafts movement titans. She left slender written records; rather, her art became her diary and Flower Diary unfolds with an artwork for each episode of her life.

In this sumptuous and precisely researched biography, celebrated poet and biographer Molly Peacock brings Mary Hiester Reid, foremother of painters such as Georgia O’Keefe, out of the shadows, revealing a fascinating, complex woman who insisted on her right to live as a married artist, not as a tragic heroine. Peacock uses her poet’s skill to create a structurally inventive portrait of this extraordinary woman whom modernism almost swept aside, weaving threads of her own marriage with Hiester Reid’s, following the history of empathy and examining how women manage the demands of creativity and domesticity, coping with relationships, stoves, and steamships, too. How do you make room for art when you must go to the market to buy a chicken for dinner? Hiester Reid had her answers, as Peacock gloriously discovers.

Sales and Market Bullets

• Coincides with major retrospective exhibition of Mary Hiester Reid at the AGO and 100th anniversary of the artist’s death.
• Mary Hiester Reid, born near Philadelphia, lived in both Toronto and the Catskill Mountains, rubbing shoulders with many of the era’s movers and shakers, from Tiffany associate Candace Wheeler, mother of American Arts and Crafts, to Parisian Art Nouveau giant Eugène Grasset.
• Molly Peacock is an internationally renowned poet and spearhead of the original Poetry in Motion in New York City.
• Molly Peacock’s The Paper Garden received starred reviews from Library Journal and Booklist and was praised by the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post and named a Book of the Year by The Economist.
• A trailblazing artist and feminist looks at the life of Mary Hiester Reid, a woman who opened the door to marriage and art and, as a result, became the most productive painter with the most ambiguously scandalous life you’ve never heard of.
• Molly Peacock’s The Paper Garden was published by Scribe in Australia and Bloomsbury in the U.K. Named a best book of the year by The Irish Times, Sunday Mail Brisbane, and The London Evening Standard, and positively reviewed by Vogue Australia, Sydney Morning Herald, and The Financial Times.

Audience

• Readers of The Paper Garden
• Gift buyers for Christmas, Mother’s Day, birthdays, etc.
• Those interested in art, Canadian artists, the revival of Canadian female artists
• Public radio listeners
• Readers of The New Yorker (and people who just carry around the tote bag)
• People who watched and enjoyed Portrait of a Lady on Fire
• Members of art galleries across North America
• Politically savvy women 25–40 who are thinking about art and feminism politically
• Readers of The Cut