Josephine Marien Crawford (December 31, 1878 – March 24, 1952) was an American painter, born into an old, aristocratic family in New Orleans, Louisiana.
[1] In her youth she wrote poetry, much of it about the house and its surroundings; she spent time in North Carolina and in Biloxi, Mississippi as well,[2] which further informed her sensibilities.
[1] In Europe she entered the Cubist scene in Paris and became friends with and was mentored by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy, and others.
[1] Her Cubist-inspired style, developed after her French sojourn, later gave way to a more fluid and expressive technique, which came to full flower in the watercolors and gouaches she produced in the 1930s.
[3] Crawford's most unusual work was a series of eight large portraits of family members, created from photographs[3] and painted on the wallpaper of the parlor at her house, which she used as her studio;[1] these pieces, in which a few inches of the patterned wallpaper are allowed to serve as a pictorial border, are reminiscent of the work of Henri Matisse and Amedeo Modigliani.
[2] They were among the pieces donated by her brother after her death; they were carefully removed from the walls after the house sustained damage in Hurricane Betsy,[3] and later remounted for exhibition.