Edith Dale Monson was born in New Haven in 1875 and educated at Smith College. She moved to New York to work as a free-lance illustrator and eventually entered the Art Students League, where she became a devoted pupil of Robert Henri. He was the co-founder of the avant-garde group called “The Eight”, a precursor to the fabled “Ashcan School” of urban realist painters. Henri was a charismatic and highly influencial teacher, and his students (and Edith Monson’s fellow classmates) included Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, Stuart Davis, and George Bellows.
Henri’s goal was to have his students faithfully record the bustle and energy of the streets of New York and its people, with special attention paid to the poor and working class. Edith Monson, armed with a satchel filled with pastels, sketch pads, and assorted paints and brushes, sought to record life as she found it from the Lower East Side to Central Park, from Chinatown to the Hudson River and its Palisades. Ever socially active, Henri and Monson were in the forefront of the fight for women’s suffrage, unions and fair labor practices.
Upon her return to Connecticut, Edith Monson settled in Hartford and established a studio on Asylum Street. She devoted the rest of her life to painting and teaching in the Hartford area. She was a founding member of Women Artists of Connecticut, and exhibited at the New Britain Museum of American Art and the Town and County Club in Hartford.
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