The Hamilton cousins: Norah, Jessie, and the watercolor architect

1865 - 1960

Norah: In the most documented family in Fort Wayne, the artist was Norah Hamilton (1873-1945). The Fort Wayne Museum of Art's reading of the family is exact about it: all the Hamilton girls were taught to sketch and paint, and Norah pursued art seriously, studying with James McNeill Whistler in Paris and at the Art Students League in New York. She was a teenager when William Forsyth came to town to teach painting and sketching, in the years when the young art school occupied her Aunt Marnie's carriage house on the family grounds, from 1892 to 1902. Her mature work crossed the family's two worlds, art and reform: she illustrated books by her sister Alice Hamilton and by Jane Addams. The museum holds her charcoal "My Charwoman in New York."

Jessie: Her cousin Jessie Hamilton (1865-1960), of the homestead branch of the family, worked in the quieter medium: an etching, "Landscape," by her hand is held by the museum in the James Hamilton Collection, which is how her work survived, inside her cousin's gift.

James: That cousin, James Montgomery Hamilton (1876-1941), was born in Fort Wayne on 26 June 1876, graduated from high school in the city in 1894, and went east to study architecture at MIT and in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The architecture is Cleveland's story; the drawing is Fort Wayne's. Through 1903 and 1904 he traveled Europe documenting his journeys in watercolor and graphite, the "Arch of Titus," the "Doges Palace," "St. Giles," and in 1941, the year of his death in Cleveland on 12 January, he left his collection to the Fort Wayne Art School and Museum, a bequest the school celebrated for three weeks that autumn. He was buried in Fort Wayne. The boyhood home he never returned to live in kept his pictures, and keeps them still.

Sources:

1. Fort Wayne Museum of Art blog, "What We're Reading: The Fort Wayne Hamilton Family" (22 July 2020) (Norah's training, the carriage house school of 1892-1902, her illustrations for Alice Hamilton and Jane Addams; Jessie's etching; the museum's holdings).
2. Fort Wayne Museum of Art blog, Suzanne Slick, "Just Some of the Things He Loved" (19 September 2018), and "Treasures from the Vault: James Hamilton" (10 February 2020) (James's schooling, his European watercolors of 1903-1904, the 1941 bequest and its three week celebration).
3. Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, Case Western Reserve University, "Hamilton, James Montgomery" (born Ft. Wayne, Ind., 26 June 1876; died 12 January 1941; buried in Ft. Wayne).