Born in 1876 in West Hartford, Connecticut, Edith Dimock was the daughter of a wealthy New England textile manufacturer. She began her artistic career at the New York Art Students League where she studied for four years before working with William Merritt Chase at his New York School of Art. Most likely introduced by a mutual friend in the Robert Henri circle, she married fellow artist William Glackens in 1904 in her family's Vanderbilt Hill mansion. As a wedding present, Robert Henri painted portraits of the bride and groom.
Dimock’s work, similar to the artistic and social concerns of The Eight, expresses spontaneity and an interest in the gritty realism of life. Her works were shown in 1908 with seven other painters at the Macbeth Galleries at the Ashcan School. Dimock exhibited at the New York Armory Show of 1913, where she showed eight works, all of which were purchased from the Armory Show.
Dimock was an honorary secretary of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies in 1911 and 1915. In 1913 she marched in the large suffrage parade in New York, along with a group of other artists.
Unfortunately, much of Dimock’s output is lost. After Glackens died in 1938, Dimock was so grief-stricken that she destroyed as much of her own work as she could. Anything surviving had been sold, given to other people, or was overlooked. What survived – a body of work consisting of a couple paintings, about sixty known watercolors, and reproductions of forty-eight book illustrations – reveals a master of the watercolor medium with a fresh vision fixed on the humorous, whimsical aspect of the urban scene.
