Susan Watkins

About the Artist

Susan Watkins

Susan Watkins (1875 – 1913) was an American artist, known for painting in the styles of realism and impressionism. She studied under William Merritt Chase and Raphaël Collin.

At his death in 1946, Norfolk, Virginia, banker Goldsborough Serpell bequeathed to the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences (now the Chrysler Museum of Art) a remarkable gift of paintings, oil studies, academic drawings, and sketches by his wife, the artist Susan Watkins. Among the most important acquisitions made by the museum prior to the arrival of Walter P. Chrysler's collection in 1971, the donation comprises sixty-two works of art by Watkins, as well as photographs, scrapbooks, and other memorabilia documenting her career. It also includes a posthumous portrait of the artist painted by her colleague and longtime friend William Merritt Chase.