Mildred G. Burrage, 1890 – 1983

Mildred Giddings Burrage was born in Portland, Maine, in 1890 to Henry S. Burrage—who would later become Maine’s first State Historian—and his second wife, Ernestine Maie Giddings. Ernestine, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist from Bangor, Maine, was also a talented artist in her own right. From an early age, Mildred showed a strong aptitude for drawing and painting, which her parents nurtured by enrolling her in various art classes.

Her formal education began in 1908, when she was eighteen, at the Wheeler School in Providence, Rhode Island. Just a year later, Mary Colman Wheeler invited Mildred and several classmates to spend the summer painting in Giverny, France, where Wheeler had founded an art school in the “Hameau.” There, young American women painted en plein air and practiced drawing from live models.

Burrage returned to Giverny in the summer of 1910 and soon decided to remain in France to continue her studies. Between 1911 and 1912, she also returned to the Wheeler School to teach.

Mildred Burrage’s first experience in Giverny marked the beginning of several extended stays in France between 1909 and 1912, including several months in Paris. In 1913, she spent a year in Rome, further deepening her artistic education. These formative European sojourns laid the foundation for a career that would span nearly seventy years.

While in France, Burrage encountered Claude Monet and formed connections with numerous American artists working abroad, including Frederick Carl Frieseke, Richard E. Miller—who became her mentor and friend in 1908—Lawton S. Parker, Guy Rose, Edmund Greacen, Frederick MacMonnies, and Karl Anderson. She also visited museums, galleries, and exhibitions throughout Paris and beyond, immersing herself in the vibrant European art scene. One particularly powerful influence was the 1910 Salon d'Automne, where she was deeply moved by the work of Henri Matisse.

According to Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr., “On October 15 [1910] she moved into her room at the American Art Students Club [sic] at 4 rue de Chevreuse in Paris, near the Luxembourg Gardens, where she would live for the next eight months” (2012, n.p.). Like many other residents of the Club, Burrage enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where she studied under Lucien Simon, and at the Académie Colarossi, where her instructor was Henri Caro-Delvaille. She also continued to study privately with Richard E. Miller at his Paris studio. During this period, Burrage focused on painting flowers, gardens, and landscapes.

Her work was exhibited not only at the Girls' Art Club and the 1911 Salon des Indépendants, but also at the Salon d'Automne (1912), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1911, 1913), and The Art Institute of Chicago (1913). In 1912, she received the Whitney Hoff award of 1,000 French fances for her painting Le Bourg, shown at the International Art Union Exhibit in Paris.

The lasting impact of Burrage’s formative years in Europe was highlighted in the Portland Museum of Art’s 2012 exhibition, From Portland to Paris: Mildred Burrage's Years in France, which featured more than 70 of her works. According to the museum curators, the exhibition captured “a unique time of innocence, ebullience, and optimism in Mildred Burrage’s life and career, and in the American and European psyche before the onset of the First World War” (cited in Shettleworth, 2012, n.p.). In the accompanying catalog, Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr. noted, “For Mildred Burrage, the years from 1909 to 1914 were the cornerstones of a long, extraordinary life devoted to pursuing new ways of expressing herself through art” (quoted in the Sun Journal, June 17, 2012, n.p.).

The outbreak of World War I compelled Mildred Burrage to return to Maine, where she continued both painting and writing. She settled in Kennebunkport with her sister Madeleine—known as “Bob”—a jeweler and gemologist, and remained there for nearly thirty years, from 1917 to 1947. Over time, Burrage's artistic style evolved from the Impressionism of her early career toward Abstract Expressionism. Later in life, she began creating distinctive collages using mica, some of which are now held in the collections of the Farnsworth Art Museum and the Colby College Museum). Influenced by Jackson Pollock in her postwar years, Burrage developed a unique technique: “After attaching mica, foil, and paper to a panel, she would paint abstractly on the surface of the collage” (Shettleworth, 2016, 34). Several of these innovative “Maine Mica Pictures” were exhibited at the Jesup Memorial Library in Bar Harbor in July 1933 (ibid.).

During the 1920s, Burrage drew inspiration from American cartography and historical themes. She produced a series of relief paintings based on historic prints, maps, and engravings, reviving the ancient Italian gesso technique in the process. Her work garnered national attention; First Lady Lou Henry Hoover attended the 1929 opening of Burrage’s map exhibition at the Dunthorne Gallery in Washington (“Mrs. Hoover Sees Unique Maps [...]”). Among these works was a relief painting depicting the Battle of Bunker Hill, likely based on a 1775 vignette by Sayer and Bennett. This piece is currently held in the collection of the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library.

During the Great Depression, Burrage joined the many American artists who contributed to the cultural initiatives of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Among her projects were two murals created for the new science library at Bryn Mawr College (circa 1940), as well as a collaborative work with Frederick A. Delano—President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s uncle—a handkerchief map of Washington, D.C., based on an original 1792 design.

Between 1931 and 1936, Mildred and her sister Madeleine traveled extensively through the American Southwest, Mexico, and Guatemala. While Madeleine collected stones for her jewelry, Burrage painted local landscapes, marketplaces, and people. Works resulting from these travels were exhibited in galleries across Maine, New York, and Chicago (Shettleworth Jr., 1962, 28–29).

During World War II, Mildred Burrage served her country by volunteering at Halloran General Hospital in Staten Island, New York, where she and her sister taught art to wounded soldiers from 1944 to 1945. Their work was part of the Arts and Skills Program, a therapeutic initiative subsidized by the American Red Cross. Launched in February 1943 across several New York hospitals, the program trained convalescing Army and Navy veterans in handicraft techniques, allowing them to create items for personal use or sale. In addition to her teaching, Burrage served as a medical illustrator at Halloran, producing detailed drawings and watercolors that documented eye and facial injuries sustained by soldiers. Many of these works from her time at Halloran are now housed in the Otis Historical Archives of the National Museum of Health and Medicine.

In the final decades of her life, Burrage became increasingly active in historic preservation. In 1954, she founded the Lincoln County Historical Association and later served a term as a director of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. She and her sister Madeleine settled in Wiscasset, Maine in 1947, where they remained for the rest of their lives. In 1957, Burrage founded the Maine Art Gallery in Wiscasset, a significant cultural contribution to the region. Among its early board members were Marguerite Thompson Zorach, a fellow Girls’ Art Club alumna, as well as Zorach’s daughter, painter Dahlov Ipcar.

Today, Mildred Burrage is recognized as one of Maine's premier women artists. Her papers can be found at the Maine Women Writers Collection of the University of New England. Mildred and Madeleine were each awarded honorary Master of Arts degrees by Colby College in 1963 ("Madeline Burrage Dead; Maine Gemologist Was 84"). An extensive collection of Mildred’s artworks and Madeleine’s jewelry can be viewed on the Portland Museum of Art’s website.

In 2016, Burrage’s longtime friend Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr., along with Sally W. Rand, curated a major retrospective of her 65-year artistic career at the University of New England Art Gallery. The exhibition showcased the remarkable breadth of Burrage’s work, including landscapes, seascapes, portraits, patriotic posters, historic map-inspired reliefs, studies of flora from the American Southwest and Central America, and depictions of World War II-era shipbuilding.

According to the Maine Historical Society:

After her death in 1983, the Portland Museum of Art acquired the art studio and personal papers of Mildred Giddings Burrage. The PMA intended to de-accession and transfer the archival materials to the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art when members of the public requested the materials stay within Maine. Mildred’s father, Henry Sweeter Burrage, had a long standing relationship with the Maine Historical Society therefore MHS was deemed a logical repository for Ms. Burrage's collection.

As of August 2023 the finding aid is no longer accessible and it appears the collection has been deaccessioned.

Sources

• “Arts and Skills To Be Taught Convalescents.” The Daily Mail, January 26, 1943, p. 5. Newspapers.com
• Beem, Edgar Allen. “Mildred Burrage Goes to France.” New England Today, April 25, 2012.
• Brennan, Jan. "Dilettante: Last chance to see 'Mildred Burrage' at the PMA." The New Maine Times, June 27, 2012.
• Burrage, Mildred Giddings.  "Art and Artists at Giverny." World Today, vol. 20, no. 3, March 1911. pp. 344-351. Google Books.
• Burrage, Mildred G. "The attack on Bunker Hill in the peninsula of Charlestown the 17th of June 1775."  Map.  1926.  Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center. 
• Finding Aid for Maine Historical Society Coll. 2494, Mildred Giddings Burrage (1890-1983) Collection. *As of August 2023 the finding aid is no longer accessible and it appears the collection has been deaccessioned.*
• Finding Aid for OHA 229 Medical Illustration Collection, Otis Historical Archives, National Museum of Health and Medicine, Series III Post-World War I Illustration, Box 023: Mildred G. Burrage, Halloran General Hospital, pp.166-172.
• Gephart, Kathryn B. Ellen Anderson, Mildred Burrage, and the Errancy of Modernist Painting. MA Thesis, University of Cincinnati, 2013.
• Heller, Jules and Nancy G. Heller, “Burrage, Mildred Giddigns (1890-1983).” North American Women Artists of the Twentieth Century: A Biographical Dictionary. New York: Routledge, 1995, p.100. 
• “International Art Union Gives a Fine Exhibition.” The New York Herald (European Edition), November 17, 1912, p. 3. International Herald Tribune Historical Archives.
• Keyes, Bob. "Plein to see." Portland Press Herald, April 19, 2012. 
• "Madeline Burrage Dead; Maine Gemologist Was 84." New York Times, July 28, 1976, p.27.
• Maine Art Gallery Wiscasset.
• Mica collages by Mildred G. Burrage at the Farnsworth Art Museum.
• "'Portland to Paris': Portland Museum of Art showing works painted by Mainer Mildred Burrage while overseas." Sun Journal, Lewiston, Me., June 17, 2012.
• Shettleworth, Earle G., Jr.. "The Making of an Artist: Mildred G. Burrage's Early Years." Republished in Resource Library, May 14, 2012.
• Shettleworth, Earle G., Jr. The Art Of Mildred G. Burrage: Exhibition Catalogue. University of New England Art Gallery, March 2016.
• Special from the Monitor Bureau. "Mrs. Hoover Sees Unique Maps Done in Ancient Style: Attends Painting Exhibition in Washington where Old Italian Style is Used." The Christian Science Monitor, March 19, 1929, p. 2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.