Mary Blood Mellen. Mary Blood Mellen was an American painter who was one of several individuals who studied under Fitz Henry Lane.
Mellen is one of a number of women painters associated with the Hudson River School of artists in nineteenth-century New England. Her paintings often included landscapes and maritime images.
Though she spent time in New York and Connecticut, Mellen lived primarily in Massachusetts, and many of her paintings find their source in the Massachusetts and Maine landscapes and seascapes. In 1840, she married the Rev.
Charles W. Mellen, a Universalist minister at a number Massachusetts churches prior to his death in 1866. As a copyist, Mellen created studies and copies of the work of her friend and mentor Fitz Henry Lane.
According to Phebe Ann Coffin Hanaford, When called at her residence to see the latest copy of, the and the copy were brought down together. evidently as a lighthearted challenge to Lane, to spot which was his original. As a talented painter in her own right, Mary created numerous compositions of her own as well. Her paintings include a landscape of the Blood family home, a representative seascape entitled Shipwreck on the Beach, and a painting that portrays ships at sea as well as a pastoral New England countryside entitled Field Beach. Like Lane and others associated with the Hudson River artists, Mellen painted in the luminist style popular in mid-ninetee