A New York transplant became well known for her paintings of Arkansas wildflowers. Inez Whitfield was born in New York in 1867 and was educated in the northeast, eventually founding the Whitfield-Bliss School for Girls in New York City.
By the turn of the century her rheumatoid arthritis led her to visit Hot Springs for its therapeutic baths and she moved there. Though confined to a wheelchair, she immersed herself into Hot Springs society, helping to found the Little Theater and the Hot Springs Garden Club among others. But she was best known for her watercolor paintings of Arkansas wildflowers. She would traverse local trails in her wheelchair to gather specimens to paint, and people later sent her flowers from around the state.
Her work was displayed at the Rockefeller Center in New York and the University of Boulder. In the 1940s the Federated Women’s Clubs of Arkansas bought four hundred of her paintings, which now are in the collections of the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts. She died in 1951.
To learn more, visit encyclopediaofarkansas.net.
