Carl Zigrosser, who had studied it carefully, wrote that "Her work is imbued with pity and compassion, a sense of irony, and the understanding that comes of deep experience.

[4][5] Early in 1899, a critic for a local weekly magazine called The Wave said her portraits were the best ones in the show, "being handled with a degree of delicacy and feeling characteristic of the true colorist.

[8] At about the same time, still living with her parents, she moved to Manhattan, and there a publisher commissioned her to make illustrations for a book about animals in the western United States.

[4][5] For the next few years she continued her efforts to establish herself as a professional artist and, from 1903 to 1906, listed herself in the American Art Annual as a painter and illustrator.

The critic praised another of her paintings, called Portrait of a Man, for its "fine characterization" and rich color that "functions definitely in the achievement of form.

"[16] Within a year of her return, the Paris prints and the ones she began to make in New York helped to establish her as one of America's best lithographic artists.

In a lengthy review, Margaret Breuning of the New York Evening Post wrote that the show contained "gay happy lithographs accomplished by a true artist, whose affectionate pulse is nicely attuned to the heartbeats of those she so faithfully depicts.

[17] A critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that she had infused the subject with a "sensed spirit of mystery" and thereby accomplished an "emotional trick of picture making".

A lithograph Dwight made in 1929 called Ferry Boat was chosen by the Institute of Graphic Arts as one of its "Fifty Prints of the Year".

He wrote that she depicted mansions that had become "solemn ghosts" along with graveyards and other somber subjects, but also presented "frankly carefree", even "hilarious" works showing circuses and rent parties.

[25] In 1990, Christine Temin, writing in the Boston Globe explained that the picture commemorated the time when women were first allowed to join men in drawing nude models at the Whitney Studio Club.

"[26] In 2014, an exhibition catalog pointed out that the model looks back at the artists just as they examine her and said the women sketchers in the picture could be seen "as representing the feminist idea of the male gaze.

[33] In 1936, she was listed as one of America's best printmakers in Prints magazine and, in a news article, was said to have "climbed to the top of a difficult and highly competitive field.

... People twist themselves into grotesque shapes as they lean on the rather low railing; posteriors loom large and long legs get tangled.

[37] During these five years she continued to be productive turning out prints that, "in the tradition of Honoré Daumier", as one source says, "combined humor with political commentary.

[5][38] In 1936, Dwight contributed an essay to a book that the Federal Art Project intended to publish in order to demonstrate the importance and quality of the program and its artists.

In her essay, Dwight says aesthetic demands conflict with the satiric wish to show "the inevitable defects inherent in life".

"They frankly enjoy painting Coney Island, gasoline stations, hot-dog stands, cheap main streets, frame houses with jig-saw bands-all the Topsy-like growth of our cities."

[40] Citing her "rich, healthy human commentary", a reviewer wrote, "Wherever masses of people circulate, on the ferryboats and street corners, in the parks and movie houses, Miss Dwight has found seemingly inexhaustible material.

Calling them ""saturated with mood" and "pleasing to the eye", the critic praised her ability to portray "comic aspects with gaiety rather than sarcasm" and said the human figures she showed were "solid and carefully built up psychologically as well as physically.

In that respect, it may fall into a category mentioned in her essay on satire, in that it appears to address compositional problems and technical difficulties but not what she called "discrepancies between the real and the ideal".

But whatever ups and downs of political or social faith I may have passed through, I have been true to the fundamental conviction that poverty is the great evil, a form of black plague inexcusable in a scientific age.

[39] In 1918, she joined with 49 other like-minded people in a pressure group called "Fifty Friends" that advocated clemency for men who were imprisoned for declaring themselves to be conscientious objectors during World War I.

[47] Living in Manhattan during the 1930s, she joined one of the Marxist John Reed Clubs and supported another Popular Front organization, the American Artists' Congress.

Nonetheless, not wishing to become a propagandist and fearing she would lose sales that she needed to support her precarious existence, she rarely produced works of an overtly political character.

[5] In the mid-1890s, Dwight completed her secondary education and, as noted above, began studies under Arthur Mathews at the Mark Hopkins Institute.

[4] Before she separated from Higgins, Dwight's friend Carl Zigrosser introduced her to an architectural draftsman named Roderick Seidenberg.

American Women Painters of the 1930s and 1940s; The Lives and Work of Ten Artists (Jefferson, North Carolina, McFarland, 1991) Kort, Carol, and Liz Sonneborn.

A to Z of American Women in the Visual Arts (New York, Facts on File, 2002) Robinson, Susan Barnes, and John Pirog.

The Artist in America; Twenty-Four Close-Ups of Contemporary Printmakers (New York, A.A. Knopf, 1942) Media related to Mabel Dwight at Wikimedia Commons