Cooksville’s Artists and Artisans, Part Two: Leila Dow, by Larry Reed

The Village of Cooksville had a reputation for being a “cultured little burg” in the 19^th century and on into the 20^th.  Although the village’s popular “Opera House” (the second floor of Van Patten’s Meat Market) burned down in 1893, other venues for local and traveling performers remained. The Lyceum Auditorium, used mainly as a private schoolroom for higher learning on the second floor of the Van Vleck Farm Implement Factor, was available for various entertainments. So were the Schoolhouse, the Masonic Lodge’s meeting room above the General Store, and the basement parlor room of the 1879 Cooksville Congregational Church.

Some of Cooksville’s artisans were material artists, creating pottery, paintings and weavings. Several wrote poetry and short stories, and some were talented musicians performing in homes and churches in the village and in nearby communities.

One of Cooksville’s talented early painters was Leila Aileen Dow (1864-1930).

Leila Dow (1864-1930), date unknown

Dow Farm west of Cooksville, c.1873

Leila was one of the daughters of the prominent farmer John Thayer Dow (1831-1917), who lived in the historic Lovejoy-Dow House just west of the village and whose Dow’s Grove was a popular picnic area on the south side of the Badfish Creek. Dow farmed there from 1854 to 1882, and his diaries are detailed evidence of the daily activities of his family. (Another one of the talented Dow

Myrtle Helene Dow, c.1895

daughters, Myrtle Helene Dow, went on to become an actress in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she married, and in London; however, there is no record of any of her performances in Cooksville or elsewhere.)

Leila Dow graduated from Madison’s Central High School and studied art at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and at the Art Institute of Chicago.  She taught art (china painting and oil painting) in Evansville and Madison schools, as well as in her studio in Madison, where she lived most of her life. In1894, she won art prizes at the Dane County Fair, and she was a busy “Teacher of drawing and painting,” according to her business card.

She spent many summers at Susan Porter’s home in Cooksville, where she painted landscapes and garden flowers in and around the village in the late 19th and early 20^th centuries. Many of her works were inspired by the gardens of Ralph Lorenzo Warner (1875-1941) and Miss Porter (1859-1939), who was her life-long friend.  One of her paintings is of the Cooksville Mill and Dam on the Badfish Creek.

 “Cooksville Mill,” by Leila Dow

(She gifted the painting to the James Roherty family that had worked on the Dow farm); others are of wooded and hilly landscapes and flowers such as squash blossoms and bright peonies. Her works were exhibited in Madison and Milwaukee.

“Squash Blossoms” by Leila Dow

“Peonies” by Leila Dow

“Landscape” by Leila Dow

Leila painted in a quick, impressionistic style with bright colors and loose brush strokes in oil or in her flowing watercolors, capturing an immediate impression of delicate light and color emanating from her natural subjects.  Several of her works, water colors and oil paintings—landscapes and flowers— remain in Cooksville; undoubtedly, others are in the Madison area. It is possible that Leila may have known one of America’s most important Impressionist painters, Theodore Robinson (1852-1896), a native of nearby Evansville, Wisconsin, who spent much of his short life with the famous French Impressionist painters in France. (One of Robinson’s paintings was recently offered at auction in New York City for $700,000-$900,000.)

Importantly, Leila was one of the original organizers and charter members of the Madison Art Guild, which was begun about 1914.  Her obituary said she was an “artist, club leader”… with a “ready wit.”  After Leila died in Madison, many of her art works were sold to benefit the Art Guild. Her paintings remain as evidence of her artistic talents.

[The second in a series of stories about the artists and artisans of the Village of Cooksville.]