Lillian Burk Meeser   (1864-1942)

Born at Ridley Park, Pennsylvania, July 9, 1864.  She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Art Students League, New York City; The Worcester, Massachusetts Museum of Art; and with Hugh Breckenridge, Philip Hale, George DeForrest Brush, Charles Woodbury, Joseph DeCamp and other eminent artists. 

Member of the Art Alliance, the Plastic Club, and the Fellowship of Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, all of Philadelphia; the North Shore Arts Association of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the Provincetown Art Association, Massachusetts.

Married Dr. Spencer B Meeser, a Baptist minister, in 1886.  Lived and worked as an artist in Paterson, N.J.; Wilmington, Delaware, Worcester, Massachusetts, Detroit, Michigan, Brooklyn, N.Y., Chester, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and South Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

Exhibited in the Corcoran Art Gallery, Washington, D.C., The Detroit Museum of Arts, the Toledo Museum, Toledo, Ohio; The Rochester Museum, Rochester, N.Y., The Albright Galleries, Buffalo, N.Y., The Carnegie Galleries, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; in St. Louis, Missouri, and in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where she was an invited exhibitor for several years, and served on the Jury of Admission and Award of Prizes.  She was one of seventy-five American artists invited to exhibit in Venice, Italy in 1924. 

When Dr. Meeser became pastor of the Woodward Avenue Baptist Church, Mrs. Meeser became active in the art movement in Detroit, and in 1903, founded the Detroit Society of Women Painters.  Five years later, when she moved from Detroit, she was made honorary president and was officially named the Founder of the society.

She was awarded the Mary Smith prize at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1924; also received Honorable Mention and a silver medal at the Plastic Club, Philadelphia.  Represented in many private collections of note and in the Reading Pennsylvania, Museum of Arts permanent exhibition.  In his History of Still Life Painting, Dr. Arthur Edwin Bye credits Mrs. Meeser with being one of the originators of modern decorative still life.  She died on March 16, 1942 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Biography:  Written by Mrs. Eugene E. Ayres, her daughter.  Published:  Moore, Julia Gatlin, History of the Detroit Society of Women Painters and Sculptors, 1903-1953.  Detroit, Michigan.  1953

Submitted to AskArt by Edward P. Bentley, researcher of Lansing, Michigan.