Della, 1860 – 1940, and Lillie Garretson, 1860 – 1939
Della (sometimes spelled Dillie, Dilla, or Delia) and Lillie Garretson were identical twins known as “the Garretson Girls” who remained close their entire lives.
Born in Logan, Ohio on April 12, 1860 to Allan T. Garretson from Ohio and Hannah Booth from Staffordshire, England, they were raised in Detroit, Michigan, where they returned for the last thirty years of their life. They had a brother and two sisters; one sister, Etta, graduated from Smith College in 1900 and pursued a specialization in literature at the University of Chicago.
Sometime in 1894, Lillie and her younger sister Etta rented suite of rooms in Buffalo, New York, where Etta attended high school before she left for Smith College in 1896. At the same time, Della studied in New York City at the Art Students' League and at the National Academy of Design, where she received honorable mention for her painting from life in 1896. Lillie, an artist as well, taught classes in ceramics and staged exhibits in her Buffalo studio.
While Della specialized in portrait, genre, and landscape painting, Lillie was a painter and ceramicist.
Della showed her work at the Buffalo Society of Artists Exhibitions of 1898 and 1899, though it is unclear if she had relocated upstate at the time. The twins frequently embarked on sketching trips in Connecticut, Maine, and in Williamsville, New York, where they had their own cottage and taught figure work classes en plein air.
Whereas Lillie stayed in Buffalo, Della left to study in Paris in the fall of 1900, where she appears to have lived at the Girl's Art Club. She also visited Holland, Germany, and Italy. In the of summer 1901, she spent 6 weeks studying at the Sloyd Seminarium in Nääs Sweden – an institution for manual training in handicrafts in wood (carpentry, carving, fretwork, and turnery), metal (brass, iron, and wire), leather, cardboard, brush-making, coarse painting, strawplaiting, basket-making, and book-binding.
Della moved to her own studio in the fall of 1901 at 7 rue Léopold Robert, a stone's throw from the Club. In December, Lillie came to join her in Paris, after exhibiting her ceramics at the Pan-American Exposition,
In February 1902, Della served on the hanging committee for the AWAA show at the Girls’ Art Club, where she showed two paintings, "An October Afternoon," and "The Village.” Later that year, she exhibited another two paintings at the Salon des Artistes français, "Autumn Day" and "Portrait of Miss G" (a portrait of her sister Lillie, donated to the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1942). She identified her principal teachers as Dutch American painter Leonard Ochtman and Spanish-English painter Leandro R. Garrido. Citing the Comtesse de Montaigu, who wrote for the New York Herald, The Buffalo Courier praised the work she exhibited in the Salon:
One of her pictures, an Autumn Day, is a delicious symphony of colors in mellowed autumnal tints of reds, yellows and browns, indicating a fine appreciation of color values. This unpretentious little picture is extremely simple in composition, but shows consummate art in its execution. Miss Garretson demonstrates the fact that is proficient in another field, that of portraiture, by a well drawn portrait, the likeness of her sister, which owes its excellence to bold brush work and well managed coloring in a low key. The effects are produced without clap-trap methods or garish contrasts. Miss Garretson has undoubtedly the gift of expressing character (July 24, 1905, p. 5).
Della and Lillie returned the U.S. in early September 1902, where Della opened a studio in New York City while Lillie joined their father in California in 1903, teaching painting and drawing at a newly opened private school in Berkeley.
According to the Buffalo Evening News, following her return to New York City, Della was “represented in all of the eastern exhibitions in the past year. [...] she is engaged in illustrating, having been for some time under contract by one large firm besides having a large field in special work. She lives in a charming art and literary circle in New York. Both sisters are literary as well as artistic and speak French with fluency” (July 29, 1905, p. 3).
Della moved to Detroit in the summer of 1906 and took a studio in the Fine Arts building. The previous year, she had joined the newly founded (1903) Detroit Society of Women Painters (Sculptors were added to the title in 1930), eventually becoming its Vice President in 1907. Her fellow artist and former resident at the Girls’ Club on rue de Chevreuse, Letta Crapo Smith, was the organization’s President, but according to The Bulletin of the Detroit Museum of Art, Smith was in Europe for most of that year:
In the absence of the president, much of the actual work devolved upon Miss Della Garretson, the vice-president, and it is to her untiring energy that the credit of this fourth and best annual exhibition is due. Her influence is felt in many of the pictures in the exhibition. She found her subjects in and around Detroit, an in fifteen small pictures, she plainly shows that it is unnecessary to ransack the country round for subjects, when there are so many within the confines of this city (9-10).
Lillie joined the Society in 1908.
Della and Lillie, who had given up her position in California, traveled to Italy in 1909, where they painted on commission for several months before returning to the U.S. from Naples in November. In August 1911, the twins sailed for Belgium, where they resided for a year in Bruges and traveled to Paris when necessary. In 1912, Della participated in the Salon de la Société des Beaux Arts, showing the painting “Marché aux chiffons in Bruges.” The exhibit also represented other members of the AWAA, including: Elizabeth Nourse, Minerva Chapman, Mary Fairchild, Lucy Lee Robbins, Constance Bigelow, Ethel Mars, Eleanor Norcross, Gertrude Whitney, Alice Wright, and Malvina Hoffman. Della also showed her painting "Jour d'Octobre," at the Seventh Annual Exhibition of the Art League of Holy Trinity Lodge (New York Herald, February 11, 1912, p. 6).
In May 1912, the sisters returned to Michigan, where they built a home near the village of Dexter. They continued working as artists and were actively engaged in supporting other women:
Both of the sisters served in the various offices of the organization, except that of president, as long as they were active.They exhibited with the Society regularly, with Della's last showing being at the mid-winter J.L. Hudson exhibition of work by the Detroit Society of Women Painters and Sculptors in 1940. She was eighty years old then and died a few weeks later (Detroit Society of Women Painters & Sculptors).
The sisters never married and died within a few months of one other, right around their 80th birthday (Lillie on October 19, 1939 and Della on February 27, 1940). Della’s obituary tells a bit more about their lifelong close bond:
[...] the sisters had been virtually inseparable, and the similarity of their lives was emphasized by the fact that they devoted themselves to painting. Both of them were members of the Detroit Society of Women Painters and Sculptors. They exhibited their work in Detroit and in the Salons of Paris [ed: only Della showed at the Salons]. They jointly owned three acres of land on the Huron River between Dexter and Ann Arbor, and helped to build the house which they occupied there for twenty years. They drove about the country making sketches and their home was filled with their work (Detroit Free Press, February 28, 1940, p. 19).
