ETCHED in TIME: THE ART OF MARIAN ACKER MACPHERSON

Alabama Heritage, Summer 2004 by Goldfarb, Stephen J

WITH TALENT AND A SHARP ETCHING NEEDLE, MARIAN ACKER MACPHERSON HELPED TO PRESERVE THE ARCHITECTURAL TREASURES OF OLD MOBILE SO THAT NEITHER NATURAL DECLINE NOR DEMOLITION COULD ERASE THE CITY'S MAGNIFICENT PAST.

FOR MARIAN ACKER MAGPHERSON, the magnificent homes and stately buildings of Mobile were dear old friends-the distinctive remnants of a bygone era. With intricate etchings and vivid prose, she communicated her affection for them and, over the decades, her sadness at their decline. She once dedicated a book of her etchings to her daughter Anne, saying, "Long years before she comes of age most of these quaint old landmarks will have vanished from our streets and she will never know the beauty that was here." Although many of those landmarks have now vanished, they are preserved in the art of Marian Acker Macpherson.

The Acker family had lived in Mobile for at least three generations. Marian was born on May 16, 1906, the daughter of Paul Jerome Moeris Acker, a physician, and Annie Elmer Hunter. She grew up in the house her father had purchased that same year. The grand home had once belonged to Madame Octavia Walton Le Vert, who had presided over Mobile's most celebrated antebellum literary salon. Although the post-Civil War era was one of economic stringency (Macpherson claimed that her father belonged to the "use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without" school), Marian clearly moved in the highest level of Mobile society. In 1925 she reigned as Mardi Gras queen and, along with twenty-five Mobile women, formed the Mobile Charity League, which later became the junior League of Mobile. She was also a charter member of the exclusive Maids of Mirth, a mystic Mardi Gras society founded in 1949.

She began her art education at Mobile's Barton Academy, graduating in 1923. A few years later, she sought professional training at the Vesper-George Art School in Boston. She told an interviewer of this experience:

It was no joke. It was hard. I came to the reality that those other kids were smart. . . . This was a general art school where we did layouts, still life, etching, tin can labels and a small amount of fashion illustration. I think they took me because they [had] never heard of Mobile and wanted to find out about this part of the country.

After three years of such training in Boston, Macpherson went to Cape Cod, very likely Provincetown, where there was a thriving art colony in the 1920s. There she studied etching with W. H. W. Bicknell, an artist well known for his landscapes and etchings.

In the 188Os artists had rediscovered etching, an important medium of Rembrandt and other European masters. Many American artists flocked to cities in Europe to sketch picturesque views of old-world architecture, which they transferred to the etching plate. During the 1920s some artists were discovering the charm of historic southeastern coastal cities, such as Charleston and New Orleans, and the ease with which the sharp etching needle could capture their elegant architectural detail. On Cape Cod Macpherson practiced her etching skills, rendering the humble cottages that dotted the shoreline.

MAGPHERSON'S YEARS AWAY from home undoubtedly heightened her awareness of the many architectural treasures that Mobile possessed. When she { returned to Mobile, she set up a studio with an etching press behind her father's office, the little red-brick Victorian building that still stands on the south side of Government Street near the entrance to the Bankhead Tunnel. There she began to etch renderings of the treasures she found nearby. In 1932 she published a small book entitled Prints of the Past from Old Mobile, which contained reproductions of fourteen of her etchings with three or four paragraphs of commentary for each. Only 150 copies of the original edition were produced, but another printing appeared the following year. In her introduction Macpherson explained the purpose of her book:

In putting together the pages that follow I have not attempted to relate or depict history in detail, but only to preserve and keep intact some bit of the rare charm and color of Old Mobile. Here, where the Frenchman, Spaniard and the Briton lived and lost, is a city rich in romance and quaint beyond belief.

In 1936, at the then-advanced age of twenty-nine, she married John Ritchie Macpherson, a Scottish World War I veteran who had come to Mobile to work for an uncle's shipping firm. Within six years she had four children-three girls and a boy. But marriage and motherhood did not put an end to her work of documenting historic Mobile.

In 1938 she published a second book in a similar format, Etchings of Old Mobile, which included reproductions of twenty etchings with accompanying text. A second edition of this book appeared in 1943. In the majority of the etchings in the two books, she rendered historic Mobile buildings, most often residences that had some degree of history, as well as elegance or charm. In each etching she focused on the exterior of a single structure or a section of a building, usually a doorway or wrought iron railing. Her accompanying literary vignettes frequently recounted the history of the structure, often with descriptions of its former occupants. Macpherson usually gave her estimation of how well the building had weathered the vicissitudes of time. Her vivid descriptions of structures that she had found in a state of decay or threatened by contemporary life reveal her motivation for creating the book-her hope to inspire her fellow Mobilians to preserve the treasures.