Lucy Hariot Booth

An American Impressionist painter, Lucy Hariot Booth studied at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts and at the Art Students League of New York City with Carroll Beckwith and Willard Metcalf.

By January 1893 Lucy Booth was also working with J. Alden Weir at the League and visiting with him in Branchville, Connecticut, developing a friendship with this leading Impressionist and his wife Ella.

Through this relationship she befriended other members of the Cos Cob Art colony in Greenwich, Connecticut, such as John Henry Twachtman. The Impressionist Theodore Robinson, returned from France and studies with Claude Monet in Giverny, was finding his own American landscape.

Theodore Robinson took this house for a painter's work lodge during late May to early October 1895, with encouragement from his aunt Agnes Johnston, Mrs. George A. Cheney, for his ten students---including Lucy Booth, Esther Stone, Julia Sague, Lida A. Reno, Mary Harvey Tannahill, Herbert F. Stone, his cousins Helen Estefana Cheney and Alice Maria Cheney, who was on vacation from Mount Holyoke College.

The artists from the Wheelock place made a unique and fine appearance going to the corn roast at Bela Brigham's with an ox team gaily decked out with tiger lilies, etc. It was a very pleasant sight with just a hint of ye olden times.

During the following week these artists opened the Wheelock House for an exhibition of over fifty paintings, which were welcomed, the Townshend residents being surprised that so many beautiful scenes could be found in the immediate locale.

Chas. H. Willard, 2d, one of Townshend's leading citizens and the owner of the mill property at that place, was married Wednesday evening to Miss Helen E. Cheney, late of Beloit, Wis., in the old Wheelock house, occupied by the bride's mother, Mrs. Geo. A. Cheney.

There were present relatives, mill employeesand artist friends of the bride. Miss Cheney was a promising student of the Art Students' League of New York, and came to Townshend with a party of sketchers under direction of her cousin, the late Theodore Robinson, in 1895. The house was beautifully trimmed by the bride's friends, most of whom had been fellow students.

The bride wore white, and the bride maids, Misses Julia Sague, of Poughkeepsie, N. York, and Anna Watson of Rock Hill, S. C., pink silk. Marcus Coolidge of Fitchburg, Mass., and Herbert Stone of Brooklyn, N. Y. assisted the groom. Rev. Mr. Hardy officiated and Miss Hardy played the bridal march from Lohengrin. There were many beautiful presents.

During the summer of 1895, Lucy painted some of her finest landscapes, capturing the Vermont hills in vibrant blues, greens, tans, and pinks, with her characteristic angular compositions and broken dashes of color---

Lucy H. Booth was the daughter of Franklin W. Booth and Lucy Frances Newcomb. She was born during her parents' temporary residence in Iowa in 1869.

During the summer in 1900, Lucy boarded with Charles Hosea Willard and his wife Helen Estefana Cheney and Charles' mother Susan Dunton, the widow Mrs. Warren Hosea Willard. Helen was the daughter of George A. Cheney and attended the New York Art League. Lucy returned to Vermont for summers in the following years, as in 1904, to see her friend.

When her beloved Oliver Hazard Perry III died in 1913, Lucy decided to live in full residence in Townshend, and built a house on the hillside easterly from Charles Willard's mill in the village of Harmonyville, and not far south from the historic Wood-Wheelock house that she once occupied with Theodore Robinson's school.

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Lucy Booth and her sister lived, surrounded by the rich historical heritage of their extensive antiques collection, in the house on the hillside overlooking the Harmonyville covered bridge.

Lucy died at her Harmonyville homestead in Townshend, Vermont, on October 27, 1952. She was eighty-two years old.

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