Mildred Wolfe (left) with Eudora Welty in the garden of Welty’s
home on Pinehurst Street in Jackson

A portrait of Eudora Welty painted by the acclaimed Mississippi artist Mildred Nungester Wolfe now hangs in the Center. It was presented as a gift to the University in 2002 by Thomasina Blissard, a Jackson psychiatrist. “Ole Miss seemed the best place for the portrait to hang,” she said. “I thought that more people would see it and enjoy it there.” A collector of fine art and for many years a close friend of Wolfe and of Welty, Dr. Blissard bought the painting from the artist in 1989 soon after it was finished. In the portrait, an impressionist watercolor in gray and blue, Eudora Welty faces the viewer and holds an open book. On the page is Welty’s classic story “Why I Live at the P.O.” Welty, one of America’s most esteemed and cherished writers, died in 2001. She and Wolfe were connected both by friendship and by a few artistic collaborations. Wolfe, who has lived in Mississippi since 1945, was married to the noted painter Karl Wolfe, now deceased. Their residence and their studio are located on two acres of woodland on Old Canton Road, a site that once was on the far outskirts of Jackson. A serene, quiet woman now in her nineties, Wolfe still makes her home there, sheltered from the bustling, encroaching city by the uncut forest. With her daughter, the artist Elizabeth Wolfe, she owns the Wolfe Studio and continues to create works of art and to sell them from the studio gallery.

At the age of 19 she was graduated from Alabama College, now the University of Montavallo. For about 10 years she taught Latin and English in Alabama high schools, but her true interest was art. She took a master’s degree at the Colorado Art Center in Colorado Springs. She moved to Jackson at the end of World War II, when Karl Wolfe, whom she had married, returned from the service. Springing from the American South while showing influence of the Impressionists and the artists of the Italian Renaissance, her work consists of landscapes, still-lifes, prints, mosaics, ceramics, stained glass, and portraits. Her husband turned principally to portrait painting. Both taught part time at Millsaps College. He died in 1984.

In addition to the watercolor portrait, Wolfe painted two portraits of Welty in oils. One of these is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. The other hangs at the Department of Archives and History in Jackson. Also, Welty commissioned Wolfe to paint a portrait of her parents and a portrait of her mother. These two paintings, adapted from photographs, were hung in the Welty home in Jackson.

In 1988 Wolfe and Welty combined their talents in a book published by the University Press of Mississippi. In this project Wolfe created 20 illustrations in black-and-white line art for two pieces of Welty’s fction. The book was titled Morgana: Two Stories from “The Golden Apples." The author and the artist were united in this collaboration by JoAnne Prichard Morris, at that time an editor at the press.

Art by Mildred Nungester Wolfe hangs is in many public and private collections in the South. Eighteen of her Morgana illustrations are owned by the library of the University of Mississippi Medical Center and are on continuing exhibition. Two others from the series are privately owned. The watercolor portrait of Welty has been exhibited at Mississippi University for Women and at the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art in Laurel. It has found a permanent home at the Center.

Hunter Cole