The portrait artist, Martha Elliott or "M. Vann Elliott", was born Martha Virginia Beggs on December 17, 1892 in Birmingham, AL. She was one of five children of John P. Beggs and Amy C. Etter. John's father, Hamilton T. Beggs from Liverpool, England, was a pioneer in the city's iron making industry. |
Martha Beggs graduated from local Samford College, married Vann S. Elliott of Birmingham, and had one daughter, Jane Elliott. While raising her daughter she taught elementary school and practiced drawing and painting on her own. At the age of 38 she took her first art lessons from Louise Cone of Birmingham. At age 43 she enrolled in the first of three summer courses in oil portraiture with noted artist Wayman Adams in Elizabethtown, NY. Soon afterward she began her new career as a portrait painter, residing first in Birmingham and then in New York City and Dallas, TX, where she had family connections. In 1949 she journeyed with artist friends to Europe, and in Paris she studied painting first at the Academie Julien and later at La Chaumier. In the years to follow her travels and studies took her back to Europe and to North Africa, to the western U. S. and Hawaii. As her reputation grew, so did her body of commissioned work. She exhibited in one-woman shows in Montgomery, AL (1939), Pensacola, FL (1940), East Hampton, NY (1943), Dallas, TX (1950), and Panama City, FL (1960 and 1973). In her half-century career she painted some 800 portraits, studies, landscapes and still lifes. Examples of her work reside in permanent collections of the IBM Corporation, The Alabama Archives and History, Montgomery Museum, the Wildlife Foundation, the Florida House of Representatives, and the Edward Benjamin Collection of New Orleans, LA. Her paintings have appeared in numerous publications. She is listed in Who's Who in Art, 19th - 22nd Editions, and in Who's Who in America, 38th Edition. Through most of her career she signed her paintings with her professional name, "M. Vann Elliott." Martha Elliott lived and painted during her later years in Panama City, FL, near the home of her daughter and family. She died August 31, 1987 at nearly 95 years of age. |