landscape, May 4, 1885 Longfellow was born on October 6, 1852, to Elizabeth Clapp Porter Longfellow and Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow Sr., an engineer and brother of the famed poet
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. She was born on the family's farm in
Westbrook,
Maine. As a child, she enjoyed drawing and watercoloring and accompanied her artist-cousin
Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow and his wife Harriet Spelman Longfellow to Europe in 1876. With encouragement from her family, Longfellow attended the
Museum of Fine Arts School of Drawing and Painting in 1878 and then studied under
Ross Sterling Turner, a respected
Boston painter of the
American Impressionist movement, from 1884 to 1889. Longfellow painted mostly in watercolors and often
en plein air, depicting landscapes and seascapes of coastal Maine and utilizing a blend of
realism and
impressionism. She exhibited her paintings at the
Art Institute of Chicago,
Boston Art Club,
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,
American Watercolor Society, and the
Portland Society of Art. In a 1981 exhibit of Women Pioneers in Maine Art, the
Joan Whitney Payson Gallery called her "Portland’s best known [nineteenth-century] female painter." The
Maine Historical Society, the
Monhegan Museum, and other museum collections, as well as private collectors, hold her paintings. Longfellow was active throughout her life in the art communities of Boston and
Portland, Maine. On several occasions she toured Europe, Mexico, and the
American South in the company of friends and family members such as aunt
Alice Mary Longfellow, sister Lucia Wadsworth Longfellow Barrett, brother
Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow Jr., or lifelong friend and fellow artist Catherine Talbot. Longfellow's other interests included photography, sailing, shooting, sewing, writing poetry, and performing on stage. She kept a lifelong diary. Longfellow was a lifelong resident of Portland and died at home there on September 17, 1945, at the age of 92. She was buried at the
Evergreen Cemetery in Portland. She was the closest surviving relative of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at the time of her death. == References ==