Frances Yvonne Twining was born in New York City in 1907, the only child of a textile manufacturer and an opera singer.  She spent her early childhood in England and Wales before her father’s death in 1912, at which time the family moved successively to Iowa, Montreal and finally South Egremont, a small town in Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts where her mother was raised.  Twining received her earliest art training from her father, an amateur watercolorist, and later from Charles and Katharine Almond Hulbert, Impressionist painters who summered in the Berkshires.  In 1925, she left for New York, enrolling at the National Academy of Design (1925-1931) and the Art Students League (1928-1931) and studying for three consecutive summers under Charles Hawthorne in Provincetown, Massachusetts (1930-1932).  Tiffany Foundation scholarships during the summers of 1933 and 1934 afforded her interaction with more experienced artists including Luigi Lucioni (1900-1988), Edna Reindel (1894-1990) and Byron Thomas (1902-1978).*

 

    Twining’s advancing skills, however, were no match for the financial challenges of the Depression.  Between 1933 and 1943, she struggled to support herself and her widowed mother on the modest living wage provided by her participation in the short-lived Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) in New York and in Massachusetts with its successor, the Works Progress Administration, where she produced Boston cityscapes and rural landscapes (during summers back in the Berkshires) with a distinct Regionalist flavor.  Twining’s WPA efforts were frequently exhibited and well-received.  Reviewing a one-woman exhibition of twenty of her WPA canvases at the Young Women’s Christian Association in Boston in 1940, Dorothy Adlow noted:

 

   Miss Twining has cultivated a clear and graphic style for making

portrayal of the streets, by-ways and roof-tops of Boston. Her hand is steady, her observation keen, her point of view that of a faithful recorder of fact. There are few in Boston who can match her in sheer reportorial talent. . . She paints the red brick facades, the cornices and chimneys, the vehicles, advertisements, children at play, pedestrains, in a watchful, cumulative fashion, thus summing up features of the city with complete simplicity. And yet for all her objectivity she does convey a personal touch in her well planned composition, in the orderly manner in which she adjusts the materials within the boundaries of the frame.**​​

 

     With the termination of the WPA art project in 1943, Twining was left high and dry.  Unable to secure gallery representation, she obtained wartime employment on a weapons manufacturing assembly line at General Electric in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.  Later that year, she married Irving Humber, a Viennese-born concert pianist ten years her senior, and moved with him to Seattle where he had business interests.  A marriage of convenience following a two-week courtship, it extricated Twining from her financial quandary as well as the bleak artistic prospects she confronted as a female artist in the conservative artistic landscape of New England.  Although her personal and artistic transition to the Northwest was gradual,*** Twining’s art career ultimately flourished. She joined the influential Women Painters of Washington (serving for a time as its president) which offered opportunities to interact with other local artists and exhibit locally. Beginning in the late Forties she exhibited widely, both locally and nationally, including a landmark one-person show at the Seattle Art Museum in 1946.

 

     Although Twining experimented with looser brushwork, abstraction and Asian-influenced styles and took up printmaking in her later career, it is the hard-edged, Regionalist style that she honed during her WPA period that is most coveted by museums and collectors today. Twining's 40 South Rutland Street, Boston shares many of the characteristics of the artist’s finest works: meticulously organized composition; tight brushwork; a bird’s-eye viewpoint in a rapidly receding urban space without atmospheric perspective; solid architectural elements and land forms; distinctly shaped trees and people at work and play.**** She often sought permission to enter the upper floors of office or warehouse buildings where she might obtain the elevated perspective of a higher vantage point. “Yvonne was first and foremost a watcher,” observed Claudia J. Bach, who was close to the artist late in her life, “[prone] to stand at a distance (both physical and emotional) from the complexity and messiness of human passion.”***** This “sense of reserve” is clearly manifest in her art, particularly from the Thirties and Forties.  “It is interesting to realize that while there are many human figures in her art, and often a sense of humor about their interactions or activities, they remain anonymous players in the distance. This remains true throughout her life.”******

 

    Upon her passing in 2004, the artist made a substantial bequest to fund the Twining Humber Award, an annual stipend of $10,000 given to a Washington State female visual artist, age 60 or over, who has dedicated at least 25 years to the creation of art. 

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     40 South Rutland Street, Boston depicts the current home of the United South End Settlements which is located more accurately at 48 Rutland Street in Boston's South End. The Federal-style structure, built in 1848 and located within the South End National Register District, originally housed an orphanage and was known as the Boston Children’s Friend Society Building.  Although the recent photograph in Fig. 1 indicates that little has changed at the site since the artist painted it in 1937, it is slated to undergo a substantial renovation in the near future.​​

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*Baerny, Sharon Long, “Yvonne Twining Humber: An Artist of the Depression Era,” Women’s Art Journal, Fall, 1995/Winter, 1996, pp. 16-23.

**Adlow, Dorothy, “In Boston Art Galleries,” Christian Science Monitor (Boston), April 24, 1940.

***Twining’s Regionalist style was particularly out of place in the Northwest, where avante garde painters of the so-called Northwest School (such as Mark Tobey, Morris Graves and Kenneth Callahan) held sway.

****Baerny, Ibid., p. 18.

*****Bach, Claudia J., “Yvonne Twining Humber: Reflections on the Artist on the Centenary of her Birth,” (November 29, 2007), pp. 6-7, available online at artisttrust.org, retrieved February 7, 2025. Bach suggests that Twining’s personal tragedies and challenges had much to do with her relative detachment from the subjects of her compositions.

******Ibid., p. 7.