Kate Freeman Clark Collection

Kate Freeman Clark was a significant Mississippi artist. Born in Holly Springs, MS in 1875, and raised in Holly Springs and New York City, she was inspired to begin her artistic career after visiting the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. She studied with Impressionist William Merritt Chase, founder of what is now the Parsons School of Design, first at the Art Students League in New York City, and then at Chase’s Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art on eastern Long Island. On Long Island, Clark mastered the technique of painting en plain air, or outdoors.

Clark spent most of her career in New York City, exhibiting widely across the Northeast. She sometime signed her paintings as “Freeman Clark,” to avoid discrimination due to her gender. Her last exhibition was at the Men’s Club of New York, in 1918.

Following a series of personal and professional losses – William Merritt Chase died in 1916, her grandmother in 1919 and her mother in 1922 – Clark left the art world behind and returned to Holly Springs in 1924. She would never paint again. On her death in 1957, she surprised her neighbors by bequeathing 1200 paintings to the town of Holly Springs, which served as the foundation for the Kate Freeman Clark Gallery, which opened in Holly Springs in 1963.