Background
Mowbray-Clarke was born in Nyack, New York in 1874.
Mowbray-Clarke was born in Nyack, New York in 1874.
She attended the Art Students League of New York as a girl of 16.
She was also the wife of John Frederick Mowbray-Clarke, a sculptor who helped organize of the influential 1913 Armory Show exhibition of modern art Biography and lieutenant was there that she met Arthur B. Davies in 1888. The two became romantically involved, and Davies introduced her to a number of art world notables.
In 1907 she published her first book, The Argonaut art history.
Mowbray-Clarke and Madge Jenison opened the Sunwise Turn bookshop in 1916, on Thirty-first Street just east of Fifth Avenue in New York City. Davies designed the interior, which was "burning orange," while the sign in front was created by the artist Henry Fitch Taylor.
In 1919, the shop relocated to 51 East Forty-fourth Street, part of the Yale Club building. The bookshop served as an important intellectual and social center for artists, writers, and revolutionary political thinkers in New New York
In addition to selling books, art, textiles, and sculpture, Sunwise Turn published small editions (including the first edition of the The Dance of Siva: Fourteen Indian Essays by Ananda Coomaraswamy, introducing the American public to Indian art and culture, as well as volumes by Witter Bynner, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Lord Edward John Dunsany) and hosted readings and literary events with Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, Lola Ridge, and Alfred Kreymborg.
In 1920, a young Peggy Guggenheim went to work as an unpaid assistant in the shop, absorbing Mowbray-Clarke"s influence and being first exposed to the avant-garde artists and writers who would come to shape her world as a patron. The bookshop closed for business in 1927, and the corporation was dissolved in 1928. The Mowbray-Clarkes lived in Rockland County, New York at a farm and studio called Brocken, just six miles from Davies.
In the 1930s and 40s Mary Mowbray-Clarke established herself as a landscape architect, designing the award-winning Dutch Garden in Rockland County, as well as a number of gardens found in homes near that area.
Mowbray-Clarke died in 1962 in New City, New New York The John and Mary Mowbray-Clarke Papers are held by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, District of Columbia
Like the Sunwise Turn, Brocken became a social center for exchange of political ideas from socialism to anarchism, and a place for communion between "free spirits.".