Pearson’s Study in Gray—a portrait of his wife, Emily Fetter—pays homage to artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s famous portrait of his mother, Arrangement in Gray and Black No 1 (1871). Through their titles, the artists bring attention to the formal and expressive properties of color as a unifying factor in their paintings.
After Emily’s death in 1948, Pearson married fellow artist Alice Kent Stoddard; both were dedicated volunteers at Woodmere.



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