Paintings

Lillian Burk Meeser

Born at Ridley Park, Pennsylvania, on July 9, 1864, Lillian Burk Meeser attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Art Students League, New York City; The Worcester, Massachusetts Museum of Art. She studied under impressionists Hugh Breckenridge, Philip Hale, George DeForrest Brush, Charles Woodbury, Joseph DeCamp and other eminent artists.

In 1886, she married Dr. Spencer B. Meeser, a Baptist minister. She would live and work as an artist in Paterson, N.J.; Wilmington, Delaware; Worcester, Massachusetts; Detroit, Michigan; Brooklyn, N.Y.; Chester, Pennsylvania; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and South Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

Meeser became active in the art movement in Detroit when Dr. Meeser became pastor of the Woodward Avenue Baptist Church. In 1903, she founded the Detroit Society of Women Painters

Two years later, she established a studio and gallery in Wellfleet, MA, in 1905, and was a frequent exhibitor at the Provincetown Art Association, where she was well known for her still life and landscape paintings.

She was a member of the Art Alliance, the Plastic Club, and the Fellowship of Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, all of Philadelphia; the North Shore Arts Association of Gloucester, Massachusetts; and the Provincetown Art Association, Massachusetts.

Meeser exhibited in the Corcoran Art Gallery, Washington, D.C.; The Detroit Museum of Arts, Detroit, Michigan; the Toledo Museum, Toledo, Ohio; The Rochester Museum, Rochester, N.Y.; The Albright Galleries, Buffalo, N.Y.; The Carnegie Galleries, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; in St. Louis, Missouri, and in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where she was an invited exhibitor for several years, and served on the Jury of Admission and Award of Prizes. She was one of seventy-five American artists invited to exhibit in Venice, Italy in 1924.

She was awarded the Mary Smith prize at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1924 and received Honorable Mention and a silver medal at the Plastic Club, Philadelphia. She is represented in many notable private collections and in the Reading Pennsylvania Museum of Arts permanent exhibition. In his History of Still Life Painting, Dr. Arthur Edwin Bye credits Mrs. Meeser with being one of the originators of modern decorative still life. She died on March 16, 1942, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.