American modernist, Edith Varian Cockcroft was born in Brooklyn New York in 1881 to wealthy parents and would spend her formative years living with them living in Allendale, New Jersey.

In 1898, Cockcroft traveled to France where she would meet and briefly study with Henri Matisse (1869-1954), who had a profound influence on her work for the rest of her life. During trips to the Nice and Cagnes, she would be introduced to and become a friend of Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919. Although it was rumored that she and her friend Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) were lovers, it was probably unfounded. Gauguin, like Matisse, would also have a great deal influence over her work, which shows in many of here figurative paintings and her later Haitian works.

Following in the footsteps of other young artists, Cockcroft began spending most of her time in the art colonies of Pont Aven and Concarneau, where the modernist movement was in full bloom. In 1911, she exhibited market scenes at the Paris at the Salon de la Societe Nationale des Beaux Arts. She also exhibited her landscapes and portraits at the 1910 and 1911 Paris Salon d'Automne.

In 1908, Cockcroft exhibited "St Ives" at the National Academy of Design in New York, after visiting England. She was a regular exhibitor at the National Academy from 1910 to 1915, 1914 at the Art Institute of Chicago, the International Art Union, 1910-1930 at the Pennsylvania Academy and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Edith Cockcroft married as a teenager and lived with her husband in New York City and then in Sloatsburg, New York. Her husband, Charles Weyand, was a stock broker who lost considerable money during the Depression. Charles never recovered from the loss. As the founder of Cockcroft Arts, Inc., she became the sole supporter from the sale of her paintings, her pottery, jewelry and her fabric designs.

In her later years, Cockcroft, who was also known as Edith Varian Wyland and Edythe Varian Cockcroft, would travel to Haiti where she would paint several paintings using the Haitian people and their local color as a subject.
In 1962, Edith Varian Cockcroft died in Ramapo, New York. A fire in her studio had destroyed a large number of her paintings, and in the 1990s, a large number of her works were found, having been rescued from a trash compactor.

Bibliography:
Stephanie Strass, "American Women Artists"
Who was Who in American Art, Falk
Women Artists in America, 18th Century To the Present (1790-1980): Jim Collins & Glen B. Opitz
E. Benezit
The Annual Exhibition Records of the Pennsylvania of the Fine Arts 1876-1913 and 1914-1968

Biography courtesy of Roughton Galleries, www.antiquesandfineart.com/roughton