An artistic Fortean.
Martha Hamlin was born, 1906, in Buffalo, New York, to Chauncey J. and Emily Gray Hamlin. They were a rich family with deep roots in the region. Martha went to France in her teens, where she developed an interest in art. In 1922, she studied Académie Julian, in Paris. Through the 1920s, she traveled back and forth between Europe and New York City, taking some time to study stage design (at the Parson’s School of Applied Art, in New York), collecting art by the likes of Modigliani and Chagall, and running with other modernist painters, including Picasso. She was especially connected to the Russian expatriate scene, and had an affair with Boris Grigoriev.
In 1928, still in her early twenties, Hamlin moved back to Buffalo; she and her sister soon enough departed for Taos, New Mexico, where the circulated in the Bohemian culture there, meeting Georgia O’Keefe and making a pilgrimage to Diego Rivera. Her sister would settle there, in New Mexico. Martha, though, returned to Buffalo, where she married Franciscus Visser’t Hooft, a Dutch chemist; they had three children. Raising a family, knuckling under to demands from her husband, and meeting social obligations put a crimp in Visser’t Hooft’s artistic ambitions. She did do local work, joining the Buffalo Society of Artists and, later, founding the Patteran Society, which was a progressive alternative to the Buffalo Society of Artists.
Martha Hamlin was born, 1906, in Buffalo, New York, to Chauncey J. and Emily Gray Hamlin. They were a rich family with deep roots in the region. Martha went to France in her teens, where she developed an interest in art. In 1922, she studied Académie Julian, in Paris. Through the 1920s, she traveled back and forth between Europe and New York City, taking some time to study stage design (at the Parson’s School of Applied Art, in New York), collecting art by the likes of Modigliani and Chagall, and running with other modernist painters, including Picasso. She was especially connected to the Russian expatriate scene, and had an affair with Boris Grigoriev.
In 1928, still in her early twenties, Hamlin moved back to Buffalo; she and her sister soon enough departed for Taos, New Mexico, where the circulated in the Bohemian culture there, meeting Georgia O’Keefe and making a pilgrimage to Diego Rivera. Her sister would settle there, in New Mexico. Martha, though, returned to Buffalo, where she married Franciscus Visser’t Hooft, a Dutch chemist; they had three children. Raising a family, knuckling under to demands from her husband, and meeting social obligations put a crimp in Visser’t Hooft’s artistic ambitions. She did do local work, joining the Buffalo Society of Artists and, later, founding the Patteran Society, which was a progressive alternative to the Buffalo Society of Artists.