Effie Anderson Smith
Effie Anderson Smith, also known as Mrs. A.Y. Smith, was an early Arizona impressionist painter of desert landscapes, many of Cochise County and the Grand Canyon.Biography
Smith was born in the rural countryside near Nashville, Arkansas, in 1869. She grew up in Arkansas and served as a school teacher in Hope, Arkansas until 1893, when she left Arkansas for New Mexico, and then Arizona. She studied at the National Academy of Design in New York, in Philadelphia, and also in California in Oakland, with May Bradford Shockley in San Francisco, in Laguna Beach with Anna Althea Hills and also at the Stickney School in Pasadena with Jean Mannheim and Richard E. Miller. Her exhibitions include a show of her Southwest paintings in Corcoran Hall at George Washington University in Washington, DC beginning May 20, 1931. She lived for 56 years in southern Arizona, first in Benson, then in Pearce and later in Douglas in Cochise County, and seasonally in Morenci in Greenlee County at the home of her son Lewis A. Smith.
Smith moved to Prescott, Arizona in 1951, and died there at the Arizona Pioneers' Home in 1955.
From January 11th to April 28th, 2019, the Tucson Desert Art Museum presented a 150th birthday anniversary retrospective exhibit of E.A. Smith's landscapes with 46 of her canvases on display from her most prolific years, including four of her renowned Grand Canyon paintings.
