The works were just as far apart in style as they were in locations at the auction house. I saw the colored etching first, its image of two string-playing musicians peppered with age spots on the paper and muddied by grime on the framed glass.
A small etching, it was propped on a metal rack at eye level above an array of disparate items on the table below. I’m always drawn to jazz figures and these immediately captured my eye. The artist’s signature was not distinct on the lower right bottom, so I removed the piece from its perch and turned to the back.
The rear held not only the artist’s name but bio information about her: Mildred Dillon. First, I wondered if she was the wife of Frank Dillon, an artist whose works I was introduced to a few years ago. Later, I learned that she was not.
The other painting was clear across the room, hanging among artworks in an area the auction house normally designates for such. It was full of bold colorful brushstrokes broken up by the black-ink outline of a woman’s face and torso. In this case, I was drawn to the color of the painting and the serenity of the image.
This artist’s name was much more readable: Cox Cecchini. And on the back of the painting someone had attached a program from a 1967 exhibit of the works of Frances Cox Cecchini at the Woodmere Art Gallery in Philadelphia.
The women had two things in common: Both were painting around the same time in the Philadelphia area, and both had exhibited at the Woodmere Art Gallery, now a museum in Northwest Philadelphia that features local artists. Opened in 1940, it is housed in a 19th-century mansion whose owner bequeathed the building and his collections to the public.
The artwork by Mildred Murphy Dillon was titled “String Section,” and was a carbograph relief etching, according to the information on the back of the program. Artists Dox Thrash, Hubert Mesibov and Michael Gallagher founded a technique called carborundum in the 1930s.
Dillon was both a printmaker and painter. A short faded newsprint bio on the back of the program mentioned that she was: “Born in Philadelphia (1907). Studied at the Phila. Museum School, Pa. Academy of Fine Arts, Barnes Foundation and Europe. Printmaking with artist Earl Horter and Print Club Workshop. In permanent collections of Phila. museum, Atwater Kent Museum. Morris Award PAFA. Exhibited through the U.S. and Canada.”
She studied at those various art schools in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Horter was a well-known artist, printmaker and collector at the time.
A notation on the back also showed that she exhibited at the Print Club, the Art Alliance and the Allen Lane Art Center, all in Philadelphia. She was a member of the American Color Print Society, of which she was vice president in 1967, as mentioned in a newspaper article about an exhibit she participated in. She had been vice president since 1955.
She also exhibited at the Woodmere in 1946, and received the Harrison Morris Prize from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1953, the George Lear Memorial Prize from Woodmere in 1958 and the Klein Prize from the Philadelphia Print Club in 1967.
From 1958-1970, Dillon was in charge of the Rittenhouse Square Clothesline Show, held annually in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia since 1932. Renamed the Rittenhouse Square Fine Arts Annual in 1976, it is the granddaddy of outdoor art shows in the country. It was founded by students who had studied under Horter.
Dillon died in 1992 at age 85.
Frances Cox Cecchini was born in Wilkinsburg, PA, near the Ohio-Pennsylvania line west of Philadelphia. She studied at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute of Technology and Columbia University, graduating with bachelor and master degrees in fine art, according to her bio on the exhibit program. She studied under Robert Lepper, Dong Kingman and Frederick Gill.
She won first place in oils in a 1945 Carnegie Museum Association Artists of Pittsburgh competition, a drawing award in the Ninth Annual Area Exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in 1955 and a special award from the Philadelphia Water Color Club in 1964. The Smithsonian has an artist file of her reviews, exhibition catalogs, brochures and more.
Cecchini also taught art appreciation at a local university campus in the Philadelphia area and to female WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) in the U.S. Naval Reserve during World War II. She was a teacher of drawing and painting in the public schools, and sometimes used her four children as models for her works.
In 1972, she exhibited watercolors of Victorian houses at Panoras Gallery in New York.
Her solo exhibit at Woodmere in 1967 consisted of 42 paintings, etchings and lithographs. Several of the prints were available as duplicates. Prices ranged from $25 to $550, with several not for sale (n.f.s.).
The titles of two of the etchings beckoned to the times in which they were painted and exhibited: “Medgar Evers,” named for a civil rights leader who was killed in Mississippi in 1963, and “I Want ‘Em to See the Dogs Work – Bull Connor,” named for a brutal segregationist from the 1960s.
The quote was taken from Eugene “Bull” Connor, police commissioner in Birmingham, AL, in 1963, when he directed his officers to aim high-pressure water hoses and German Shepherd attack dogs at black children. “Let those people come forward, sergeant. I want ’em to see the dogs work,” he said as whites crowded around to watch the violence.
I’d love to see Cecchini’s works of Evers and Connor.
The back of the painting at auction bore no title, and I wondered if it was in the exhibit. I suspect that it was and that was why the owner had attached the program. Was it the one titled “Cindy’s Reverie,” which matched the mood of the painting?
