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Theora Hamblett Theora Hamblett was born in 1895 and grew up on her father’s farm in Lafayette County, Mississippi. She attended a small school in Paris, about a mile from her home, walking back and forth in all weather. After graduation from high school, she became a teacher, and spent over fifteen years in a rural one- and two-teacher school. She left teaching to care for her aged mother, and in 1939 moved to Oxford where she supported herself by renting rooms to University of Mississippi students. From her youth, Miss Hamblett had been strongly moved by the beauty of nature, especially the brilliant colors of the trees in autumn, and as she grew older her desire to learn to paint became very strong. She had little opportunity for training until 1950, when the University of Mississippi Art Department began offering night classes for adults. There she learned basic techniques, read books and magazines on Art, and began to develop her own distinctive style, but she discontinued formal study after the first course. Unlike her fellow-students, she did not see painting as self-expression, but as a means of recording for others her religious visions and the joys and sorrows of a vanished way of life. To us it seems an unimaginable primitive and isolated life, without telephones, running water, electric light and appliances, automobiles or even paved roads. Perhaps the very fact that her experiences were few and limited kept their details vivid in Miss Hamblett’s memory. Thus, even after fifty years, she could paint them with a child’s directness in all their intense color and emotional power. Dr. Lucy Turnbull |
Miss Hamblett painting in her studio c. 1970
Theora and Hurbert Hamblett c.1902 |
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