BPARA :PAR@ ` BTEXT ` 4Walcott, Mary Morris Vaux1860╨1940artist and naturalistBorn in Philadelphia on July 31, 1860, Mary Vaux was of a wealthy Quaker family. For several years after her graduation in 1879 from the Friends Select School in her native city she devoted herself to the care of the home and the family dairy farm. On a series of family summer vacations in the Canadian Rockies she developed into an amateur naturalist, and she soon combined that interest with her lifelong love of painting by devoting much of her vacation time to making watercolors of wildflowers. In June 1914 she married Charles D. Walcott, a geologist and paleontologist and secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. She was thereafter an active hostess in Washington, D.C., and assisted her husband in various projects. She continued her painting, and in 1925 the Smithsonian Institution published in limited and library editions a five-volume North American Wild Flowers, containing 400 of her watercolors of native flowers and brief descriptions of each. The work was received with great acclaim both for the beauty and accuracy of the paintings and for the high quality of the book-making. In 1927 President Calvin Coolidge appointed her to a seat on the federal Board of Indian Commissioners formerly occupied by her brother, George Vaux; she held the post until 1932. In 1933 she was elected president of the Society of Woman Geographers. In 1935 she contributed 15 paintings to the Smithsonian╒s Illustrations of North American Pitcher-plants. She died in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, on August 22, 1940. ╓styl `
