Jessie Hamilton (1865–1960) — artist, and the Hamilton sisters

Jessie Marie Hamilton, born in Fort Wayne on January 31, 1865, was a daughter of Andrew Holman Hamilton and Phoebe Taber Hamilton, and a cousin of Edith and Alice Hamilton. With her sisters Katherine (1863–1932) and Agnes (1868–1961), she stands at the origin of organized art in this city: the Fort Wayne Art School's own official history records that the art-education movement in Fort Wayne began in 1880 in the Hamilton carriage house, turned into a studio and exhibition room under the guidance of Agnes and Jessie, and that the school occupied their aunt Margaret Hamilton's carriage house from 1892 to 1902. The sisters recruited the teachers — J. Ottis Adams and William Forsyth were brought to Fort Wayne for the project — and taught themselves when money ran short.

Jessie studied at the Fort Wayne School of Art from 1888 to 1893 under Adams and Forsyth, was a founding member of the second Fort Wayne School of Art, and taught there from 1893 to 1898. After their father's death, she and Agnes studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1898 to 1900 under Cecilia Beaux. Back in Fort Wayne, Jessie worked in pastel portraiture, watercolor landscape and etching, exhibited in Philadelphia, St. Louis, Indianapolis and Richmond, Indiana, and showed with the traveling Society of Western Artists; her work is in the permanent collection of the Fort Wayne Museum of Art. A 1916 survey of Indiana women in art described Jessie as a portrait painter and Agnes as a painter of flowers. Their cousin Norah Hamilton (1873–1945), Edith and Alice's sister, also studied under Forsyth as a Fort Wayne teenager before her Chicago career illustrating books by Alice Hamilton and Jane Addams; the Fort Wayne Museum of Art holds her work as well. Jessie Hamilton died on May 3, 1960, in Scottsdale, Arizona, and is buried with her family in Lindenwood Cemetery, Fort Wayne.

Sources: Fort Wayne Museum of Art blog, "What We're Reading: The Fort Wayne Hamilton Family" (July 22, 2020); Fort Wayne Art School institutional history (preserved in the Elizabeth Eddy artist biographical file, Archives of American Art materials via archive.org); Indianapolis News, November 1, 1916; The History Center (Fort Wayne), "The Extraordinary Hamilton Women."