Susan Watkins has been mostly lost to history. An exhibition at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia looks to return her to a place of prominence alongside female contemporaries.
By Chadd Scott, Contributor.
Published Nov 14, 2025, 01:30pm ESTUpdated Nov 14, 2025, 01:59pm EST
You don’t know Susan Watkins.
Don’t feel bad. Corey Piper didn’t either. Not really.
“I had heard of her, but only from visits to the Chrysler before I worked there,” Piper, the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, VA’s former Brock curator of American art, told Forbes.com. “I had the tiniest little notion of the name, but I didn’t know her story or her work very well. That’s typical. Through the course of working on this project, I meet American art curators and scholars, and few people before this project knew who Susan Watkins was.”
This project is “Susan Watkins and Women Artists of the Progressive Era,” an exhibition on view through January 11, 2026, at the Chrysler. Piper curated the presentation featuring approximately 75 works by more than 20 artists, including Watkins (1875-1913), Lilla Cabot Perry, Minerva Chapman and Anna Elizabeth Klumpke.
You’ve never heard of them either. You’re not alone.
“Many of these artists, their work is not held at all (in museums). It’s completely forgotten because there’s not that institutional repository to preserve it,” Piper, who has moved on from the Chrysler to the Virginia Museum of History & Culture, said. “Lucy Lee Robbins is a great example. She, at the end of the 19th century among all American women painters active in Paris, was probably the most famous and celebrated. I don’t think there’s a single–that I know of–a single museum in the United States that holds work by her.”
Watkins has been mostly lost to art history, but in a role reversal of a common circumstance, it was her widow who assured her legacy survived at all.
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Image: Edwin Scott Bennett (American, 1847 – 1915), “Susan Watkins in Her Studio,” ca. 1910. Gelatin silver print. Jean Outland Chrysler Library, Chrysler Museum of Art.