Director of the Wilmington Academy of Art and the Delaware Art Center, Edith Howard was also a member of the Philadelphia Ten, a group of women who exhibited together. She studied at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women and with Elliott Daingerfield and Henry Snell.

Affiliations included the American Watercolor Society and the National Association of Women Artists. She was also active in New York City where she taught at the Grand Central Galleries and School of Art.

Source: Peter Falk, "Who Was Who in American Art"

Edith Lucile Howard was born in Bellow Falls, Vermont, the daughter of business executive Daniel DeWitt Howard, a descendant of Henry Howard, one of the founders of Hartford, Connecticut. Her mother, Abigail Adams, was a descended from the noted Massachusetts family. The Howards lived in Keene, New Hampshire, and Kennett Square, Philadelphia, before settling in Wilmington, Delaware, where Daniel Howard was sales manager for the National Vulcanized Fiber Company.

Edith Howard enrolled at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women when she was nineteen and received her diploma in 1908. Her teachers there were Henry Bayley Snell (1858–1943) and Elliot Daingerfield (1859–1932); she attended the latter’s summer courses in North Carolina and became interested in landscape painting. Howard won two postgraduate fellowships to Europe, thus initiating a lifetime of frequent travel to the Continent; she is reputed to have crossed the Atlantic thirty times during her life and was particularly attracted to Ireland. She also traveled all over the United States and to South America.

When at home, Howard divided her time during the week between New York, where she maintained a studio in Carnegie Hall and taught at the Grand Central Art Galleries and School of Art, and Philadelphia, where she taught art history and fashion illustration at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (later named Moore College of Art). On weekends she lived in Wilmington, where she was administrator of the Wilmington Academy of Art and a director of the Delaware Art Center (these two organizations merged to become the Delaware Art Museum). Howard was a member of the Philadelphia Ten, a group of progressive women artists and sculptors active from 1917 to 1945. She exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1910, 1925, 1928, 1930, and 1943, and at the National Academy of Design six times between 1910 and 1927.

In 1938 Howard married Herbert A. Roberts and moved to Moorestown, where she became a prominent resident. She retired from teaching in 1949 and held her last exhibition in 1959. She died of cancer the following year.

¹ Notes 1. The biography of Howard in Page Talbott and Patricia Tanis Sydney, The Philadelphia Ten: A Women’s Artist Group, 1917–1945 (Philadelphia: Galleries at Moore, Moore College of Art and Design, 1998), pp. 125–26, is largely derived from “Lucile Howard (Mrs. Herbert A. Roberts) Distinguished Artist,” Moorestown Chronicle, June 29, 1939. See also “Lucile Howard Among ‘The Ten’ in Art Exhibit,” Moorestown Chronicle, March 16, 1939.

A descendent of Abigail and John Adams, Edith Lucile Howard was born in Bellow Falls, Vermont and attended the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (Moore College of Art) from 1904 to 1908 and won two postgraduate fellowships for European study. Among her teachers were Elliott Daingerfield and Henry B. Snell. During her lifetime, Howard made over 30 trips abroad where she painted landscapes extensively.

One of the most significant members of the Philadelphia Ten Women Painters from 1917-45, Howard was also a member of the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors, the Plastic Club of Philadelphia (1910-37), the New York Water Color Club, the Wilmington (DE) Society of Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Art Alliance and others. She taught at the School of Design for Women, Grand Central Art Galleries and School of Art in New York and lectured on art and art history over the radio and in person. She exhibited extensively with solo showings in Cleveland, OH, Palm Beach, FL, Providence, RI, Scranton and Southampton, PA, and Washington, DC.