page_title: Mary Agnes Yerkes
section_title: Early life in Chicago
hierarchical_section_title: Mary Agnes Yerkes / Early life in Chicago
caption_attribution_description: English: "After the Fire" by Mary Agnes Yerkes. Dated 1916. Pastel on canvas. Oak Park, IL.
context_page_description: Mary Agnes Yerkes, was an American Impressionist painter, photographer and artisan. She was skilled in the media of oil, pastel and watercolor. Her professional career was cut short by the Great Depression, but she still continued to paint well into her nineties with a passion for her craft and nature. She is noted for her plein-air painting while camping the American West and its National Parks.
context_section_description: Mary Agnes Yerkes was born on August 9, 1886, in Oak Park, Illinois. Her parents, Charles Sherman Yerkes and Mary Greenlees Yerkes, had moved to their North Grove Avenue home a few years earlier from Ohio. She was the third child of four siblings; Reuben Archibald, Alice Agnew, and Charles Greenlees. Mary Agnes graduated from Oak Park and River Forest High School in 1906, and became an accomplished local artist.
  Her father died in 1908. In 1913, her mother commissioned a house, the Mary Greenlees Yerkes Residence from architect John S. Van Bergen. Van Bergen was a draftsman and then a contemporary of Frank Lloyd Wright. Where most architects catered to wealthy clients, Van Bergen showed a particular interest in designing for both career women and artists. Their home was specifically designed by Van Bergen with an upstairs art studio for Mary Agnes. He even designed some of the first floor's interior trim in to frame some of Mary Agnes' mural paintings.
  The Mary Greenlees Yerkes Residence is an Oak Park Preservation Trust award recipient. The Art Institute of Chicago and listings within Oak Park directories show her living at this 450 Iowa address from 1913 to 1919. Her mother continued living with Mary Agnes until her death in California, in 1935.
  Yerkes took a two-year course in art history and decorative design at Rockford College. She then studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, where she also taught, and at the currently named School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She had special painting instruction under Wellington Reynolds, John W. Norton and Walter Marshall Clute, and participated in numerous exhibitions, including the exhibits of Chicago Artists, and the American Watercolor Society at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1912 to 1915.
  Yerkes had a solo two-week showing in October 1915, about which a Chicago critic wrote:
  Miss Yerkes' work shows remarkable versatility in both subject and medium, and she is unusually successful in doing many things well. The pictures are in oil and pastel and watercolor, and their subjects range from figures to landscape and still life, and from the daintiest spring to drifting winter snows. Thru all of her pictures, however, runs the same gift of clear, joyous, exquisite color. She will be very famous some day for her sense of color, and also for her rare gift of imagination.
caption: "After the Fire" by Mary Agnes Yerkes, 1915, pastel on canvas.
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