Marie Dorothy Dolph Pioneer Painter

An entry in the Wyoming State Museum of Cheyenne meant the world to EF, whose mother turned 98. A friend of hers found two paintings in a thrift store marked MD Dolph. The western theme depicts two horses in a paddock, a stone barn and outbuilding with red roofs in the snow. She picked them up for the 98th birthday party because EF’s Mom lived in Wyoming in the late 1920’s.

The back of the horse image shows the label ”MD Dolph, Goose Egg Ranch” below that a paper address return label that says Dorothy Dolph in Post Falls Idaho. The penciled price on the back reads $15.

Marie Dorothy Dolph Painted What She Lived

The Wyoming Museum states this work belongs to Marie Dorothy Dolph (1884-1979), a State Treasure. Into her mid 90’s she painted what she lived: Western scenes: California deserts, wild horses, buffalos, Mount Hood, Yellowstone, Oregon wilderness, the Grand Tetons, and Wyoming Ranches.

I loved this remarkable tale of an enterprising outdoorswoman and artist who achieved national recognition at age 52 in 1936. She exhibited at Rockefeller Center in NY with the National Exhibition of American Art. She showed back West, and sold through shops and trinket dealers at Yellowstone, but nothing like this.

Her life began in the countryside of Baraboo Wisconsin

She studied at the University of Minnesota 1901-1903 after she saved enough by teaching school in Wisconsin and North Dakota. She also studied Business and Art in Milwaukee. Her break came in 1908 when she studied at the Art Institute of Chicago under Alphonse Mucha and Antonin Sterba.

To give you a sense of how rare this woman was, in 1917, 9 years after she entered the Art Institute, only California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, and Washington gave women universal suffrage. When Dolph studied in Chicago, Illinois women couldn’t vote, and waited another 9 years for the opportunity to vote in a Presidential election.

Winnifred F Galloway, PhD, of the Bradford Brinton Memorial and Museum in Big Horn, Wyoming wrote that Dolph was among the first commercially successful female artists of the state. She became widely known in Wyoming, not such a reach in 1929 with a population of only 200,000. She was a true pioneer in any event.

After leaving the Art Institute she married a mechanic named Royal, and left art to homestead on the Platte River in 1913. She both raised horses for sale and bore children. Royal moved the family to Casper when he heard of work at a new airport. After raising her three boys, Dolph found the time to paint again. She probably longed for the homestead life because they moved to the area around Goose Egg Ranch and raised cattle in the late 1920’s.

Who originally owned Dolph’s two paintings? Where did they originally purchased them? She painted in the late 1920’s, and when the Depression hit, cattle became hard to sell. Biographer Galloways said Dolph painted to trade for tires, groceries, gas and household necessities. The proprietor of the Yellowstone Concession Store noticed Dolph’s work, and commissioned her to paint 1,500 canvases for tourists sales.

American Grit at its Finest

Her wandering soul kicked in and she gathered up her youngest boy in her station wagon. The next ten years they lived out of the wagon in the summers, traveling most of the lower 48 states. She gathered imagery for her paintings, returning to her homestead in the winters to paint her commissions.

In 1938 she bought land in Twenty Nine Palms where she wintered and painted, perfecting a kind of mass production of small paintings for consignment. I found a similar painting to EF’s mom’s for $300 at auction.

Dolph is a remarkable artist, a pioneer on many levels. She developed a circle of collectors including Franklin Roosevelt and the Ambassador to England. That return address label shows where she retired, so these paintings remained in her own possession until the 1970’s. She moved back to rural beauty, still painting, to live close to one of her boys.