Paintings and Drawings of California and Italy by Rowena Meeks Abdy, March 20-April 19, 1932

Rowena Meeks Abdy was born to American parents in Vienna, Austria on April 24, 1887. Her family spent eleven years in Europe before settling in San Francisco, California in 1898. From 1904 to 1905, she studied under the tonalist painters Arthur Frank Mathews, Charles C. Judson, and Will Sparks at the California School of Design. She also attended the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art, studying under Arthur Mathews until 1906. Later she took some courses in Monterey, California from Armin Hansen who had been a fellow student at the Institute. Aside from this, she was largely self-taught. She later made several trips to Europe after settling in San Francisco.

Around 1910 Rowena married Henry Bennett Abdy, an amateur journalist, writer, traveler and an­tiquarian who would promote Abdy's work. They moved to Monterey in 1910 and purchased property there in 1912. In 1915, the Abdy’s, along with Armin Hansen, made a 1250 mile trip on an old Missis­sippi steamboat from St. Louis, Missouri to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The result of this voyage was a book written by Henry and illustrated by Rowena called On the Ohio. The Abdy’s traveled extensively throughout California from 1915 to 1925, living for a while in San Diego in 1917. Rowena sketched and painted the old buildings and ruins of early California from the Spanish missions to the old mining towns. As she was physically handicapped, she had a large sedan car specially equipped as a studio, enabling her to paint on location with greater ease. Her best watercolors from these trips became the basis for her book Old California published in 1924. This limited-edition volume was printed by John Henry Nash of San Francisco, with a foreword written by the painter Gottardo Piazzoni. As only 400 were printed, the book has become a collector’s item.

By 1926, she had settled on Russian Hill in San Francisco. One of her paintings, previously shown at the Claremont Gallery in Berkeley, was selected to be part of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor’s first exhibition of works by American artists which took place from November 14, 1926 through January 31, 1927. It was during this same period, that she became part of the newly formed Club Beaux Arts, a cooperative art space in San Francisco.

Over the next decade, Abdy’s work was shown at the Courvoisier Gallery and the Valdespino Gallery in San Francisco, and in 1936 she exhibited eighteen drawings and fifteen watercolors at the Delphic Galleries in New York City. She maintained her connection to the Monterey Peninsula by becoming a member of the Carmel Art Association, with whom she exhibited between 1934 and 1942. She also contributed her art to the 1939-1940 Golden Gate International Exposition. She held a successful exhibition at the Legion of Honor in 1942, showing scenes of Death Valley. Her last years were spent in her Russian Hill home in San Francisco and she con­tinued to exhibit her work. She died there in 1945, at the age of 58.

Sources:
https://carmelart.org/artist/rowena-meeks-abdy/
Wikipedia contributors, ""Rowena Meeks Abdy,"" Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rowena_Meeks_Abdy&oldid=1087404677 (accessed June 3, 2022).