Flower Diary

By (author): Molly Peacock

“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.

AUTHOR

Molly Peacock

Molly Peacock is a poet, biographer, and memoirist. Her latest poetry collections are The Analyst and Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems from Biblioasis and W.W. Norton and Company.  She is the founder of The Best Canadian Poetry series and the co-founder of Poetry in Motion on New York?s subways and buses. Peacocks’s poems have appeared in leading literary journals such as Poetry, The New Yorker, The Malahat Review, The Women’s Review of Books, and Plume and are anthologized in The Oxford Book of American Poetry. She has also written two books about creativity in the lives of women artists: The Paper Garden and Flower Diary. Peacock lives in Toronto and teaches online for the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd St Y.

 

Reviews

“Part memoir, part biography, this is a beautifully written and layered volume that opens its arms wide and encompasses art, domesticity, the intimacy of marriage and of death. Lush and beautifully produced.” — Toronto Star
Flower Diary is written with the lingering observations and lyrical touch of an established poet, yet with an easygoing, conversational tone often lacking in didactic art biographies.” — Quill & Quire
Flower Diary, published by ECW Press, with its carefully reproduced paintings, gorgeous endpapers and glossy paper stock, puts it in the running as the most stunning book to come out of Canadian publishing this year.” — Toronto Star
“In prose as subtle and enchanting as Mary Hiester Reid’s own brushstrokes, Flower Diary paints a compelling portrait of a talented and unjustly neglected painter. Molly Peacock is unfailingly sensitive and intelligent, and at times deeply moving, as she shows how, despite the shade of domestic life and the unfavourable climate of the times, MHR brought forth her bright blossoms.” — Ross King, author of Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies
“In Flower Diary, Molly Peacock has produced an exquisitely unique work. A meticulous biography that’s also an eloquent, sophisticated portrait of intimate relationships, this book is about many things: the discipline required to make fine art, the emotional resilience required to sustain a marriage, the emotional turbulence hiding inside ‘simple’ floral paintings. Most of all, though, it’s a clear-eyed, unsentimental tribute to those who have the luck and fortitude to carry out their lives on their own terms. I devoured every detail, and was both moved and inspired.” — Meghan Daum, author of The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects Of Discussion

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“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.

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Details

Dimensions:

456 Pages
8.25in * 5.25in * 1.21in
1.85lb

Published:

September 14, 2021

City of Publication:

Toronto

Country of Publication:

CA

Publisher:

ECW Press

ISBN:

9781770416222

Featured In:

All Books

Language:

eng

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