Yvonne Twining (1907-2004)

Born in New York City in 1907, Yvonne Twining grew up in South Egremont, Massachusetts, a small town in the western part of the state, and as a teenager began taking classes with local impressionist painter Katherine Almond Hulbert. She later trained in New York at the National Academy and the Art Students League in the late 1920s, and with Charles Hawthorne in Provincetown in the early 1930s.  In 1933 and 1934, Twining was awarded two consecutive Tiffany Fellowships, allowing her to study with Luigo Lucioni, Paul Cadmus and Edna Reindel on Long Island. These painters helped to transform her artistic approach from its impressionist and academic roots to the heightened realism for which she is best remembered. 

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In 1935, Twining was hired as an easel artist for the Boston division of the Works Progress Administration, a position she held until 1943. When the WPA program was discontinued in 1943, Twining married businessman Irving Humber and relocated to Seattle, Washington, where she took on the responsibility of caring for her mother and mother-in-law, who had moved with the couple. Twining pined for the urban bustle of New York and Boston, but adapted to her new surroundings by joining numerous arts organizations and exhibiting circles. She was a member of the Northwest Printmakers, the Northwest Watercolor Society and the Women Painters of Washington, serving as President from 1947 to 1948, and exhibited at the Tacoma Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Denver Museum, and with Woessner Gallery and F. & N. Little Gallery in Seattle. From 1944 through the 1960s, Twining also participated in exhibitions at the Seattle Art Museum, including a one-woman show in 1946 after which the museum purchased two of her paintings for their collection. Her work can also be found in several other public and private collections. In 2001, in recognition of the difficulty some women artists face pursuing their careers while also tending to their familial responsibilities, Twining created the Irving and Yvonne Twining Humber Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement through the Seattle Artist Trust, to be awarded to a Washington State female artist over 60, who’s dedicated her life to the visual arts.