Mary Foote papers

Mary Foote was an American portrait painter and a disciple of the psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung.

Mary Hubbard Foote was born on November 25, 1872, in Guilford, Connecticut, to Christopher Spencer Foote (1837-1880), a farmer, and Hannah Jane Hubbard Foote (1840-1885). Her siblings included Robert Elliott Foote (1866-1916), a musician; Harry Ward Foote (1875-1942), a chemist and member of the faculty at Yale; and Margaret Spencer Foote Hawley (1880-1963), a painter of miniature portraits. Following the death of their parents, the younger children were raised by various relatives, including their aunt Elizabeth Foote Jenkins and her husband Edward Hopkins Jenkins, a chemist at and later director of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven, and Joseph Roswell Hawley (widower of their aunt Harriet Ward Foote Hawley), former governor of Connecticut, a United States Senator, and owner of the Hartford Courant. While living with the Hawley family, Mary Foote became close friends with the daughters of Samuel Clemens, and graduated from Hartford Public High School.

Foote entered the Yale School of Art in 1890; she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1906. She was the inaugural recipient of both the Alice Kimball English Prize in 1894 and the William Wirt Winchester Prize in 1897, which generously funded several years of study in Paris. There, she studied initially at the Académie Colarossi and shared a studio with Ellen Emmet (later Ellen Emmet Rand) and Emmet's sister and cousins. She soon joined the Emmets as a student of the American artist Frederick MacMonnies, in Paris and Giverny. Inclusion in MacMonnies's circle introduced Foote to Janet Scudder, James McNeill Whistler, and John Singer Sargent (who painted her in "The Sketchers," 1914). In 1901, Foote began a successful career as a professional portraitist in New York City, where she had her own studio in Washington Square, although she continued to travel. Her commissions included socially and politically prominent figures, artists, and intellectuals. Among Foote's closest friends dating from this phase of her life were the theatre designer Robert Edmond Jones and patron of the arts Mabel Dodge Luhan.

In the 1920s Foote sought treatment with American psychoanalyst Smith Ely Jelliffe. While traveling in China in 1926-1927, she wrote to Carl Gustav Jung at the recommendation of Robert Edmond Jones; when Jung agreed to see her, she went directly to Switzerland. Intending to stay for six months, she made Zurich her home for the next thirty years. As part of her treatment with Jung, she stopped painting and put the contents of her New York studio into storage. Foote devoted herself to Jung as his patient, his student, and his amanuensis, transcribing notes from his seminars and printing them on a Mulitgraph machine for dissemination to participants and other interested subscribers. As one of a number of women in Jung’s circle at Küsnacht, Foote was not the first or the only one to serve in this secretarial and editorial capacity, but her zeal for the task and her longevity in it made her a particularly effective agent in the spread of Jung’s ideas.

She returned from Switzerland in 1958, and died West Hartford on January 28, 1968.