Education
Art Students League of New New York Académie Julian, Royal College of Artist
Art Students League of New New York Académie Julian, Royal College of Artist
When she was eighteen, she enrolled in the Art Students League of New York where she took classes from John Twachtman and George Bridgman. She then traveled to Paris in 1902 to continue her studies at the Académie Julian where she was the first woman to be awarded the Concours Julian-Smith in 1904. On her return to the United States, she began to earn commissions mainly for her meticulous illustrations in magazines and books, like those she drew for Helen Hay Whitney"s book of poems, entitled Herbs and Apples (1910).
In San Antonio, Texas, she helped form the San Antonio Conversation Society in 1924.
In 1926 she met Diego Rivera. As Rivera was finishing his mural project at the Ministry of Education in Mexico City, Mistress
Van Horn joined him and other artists in the production of the work. Rivera painted her face in one of the murals on the third floor of the building.
There she spent the last twenty-eight years of her life.
Mistress Van Horn"s life was peripatetic and at times difficult. Her mother died when she was three, and shortly after moved from her family’s sugar plantation on the Mississippi River to New Orleans.
When she fourteen, she went to live in Washington, District of Columbia In Washington she met Douglas MacArthur, who fell in love with her, as evidenced by a recently discovered cache of letters written to her by him.
Van Horn was also a military officer who subsequently served under MacArthur during the First World War and retired as a brigadier general in 1940. When Margaret contracted tuberculosis and died in 1932, Mistress Van Horn, devastated by the loss, left her family for some time.
lieutenant is not clear where she went or for how lougitude
Mistress Van Horn"s artistic evolution went through at least three distinctive phases. Her early illustrations reflect her attraction to the work of Maxfield Parrish, her work of the late 1920s and 1930s are patterned on the images of Diego Rivera, and her later work was influenced by the European abstractionists, most especially her favorite, Paul Klee.