Why she matters
Scottsdale’s art story is usually told from 1947, when the Craft Center opened, or from 1937, when Frank Lloyd Wright arrived. It starts in 1909, with a Boston-trained painter setting up an easel in a homestead cottage at the corner of Indian School Road and Scottsdale Road. Marjorie Thomas was the first artist to live and work in the town, and her first customer was its founder: Chaplain Winfield Scott led his army mule Old Maud to her door to sit for a portrait. The painting is in the city’s collection.
For the next seventy years she painted the Valley that was disappearing under the Valley that was arriving — draft horses and mules, hogans, Camelback Mountain with nothing at its foot. The farm-town era had exactly one artist, and she was it.
Where to find her mark today
Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West. Her canvases hang in the Southwest Women’s Art Collection.
Indian School and Scottsdale Roads. Her cottage corner is now the northern gateway to the Main Street arts district.
The Scottsdale Fine Art Collection. Old Maud, the mule, is the city’s oldest piece of local art.
Seeing it for yourself
Western Spirit, a block off Main Street in Old Town, is the place. The Elliott gift of 2020 put nearly two hundred works by twenty-five early Arizona women painters in the museum, and Thomas’s Hogan in Desert Landscape (about 1925) is among the ones on rotation; ask at the desk, since the collection rotates. Her 2016 retrospective was at the Desert Caballeros Western Museum in Wickenburg, an hour northwest, whose catalogue is the fullest account of her life. For the town she arrived in, read the 1909 year page: the brick schoolhouse, the Ingleside Inn and the first artist all came the same year.
The full story
Marjorie Helen Thomas was born in Massachusetts in 1885 and trained in portraiture at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In 1909 her brother’s tuberculosis sent the family west for the dry air, the standard prescription of the age, and she, her mother and her brother each filed on 160-acre homesteads in the desert on the Scottsdale side of Camelback. The health-seekers’ colony that Winfield Scott had been recruiting for twenty years had produced its first painter, and she went to work at once: a studio in her cottage at Indian School and Scottsdale Roads, the town’s first, and a commission from the chaplain himself. Scott brought Old Maud, the mule that had hauled his colony’s first crops, to sit in her yard. The portrait went to the Scottsdale Fine Art Collection in the 1970s.
She stayed for the rest of her life and painted the transition she was living through. Indians Breaking Broncos (1913), the Camelback of about 1925 “before urban development,” Noon Hour (about 1930), Shepherd in Monument Valley (1938): the subjects were working animals whose “looming obsolescence” she recognized, the Native neighbors of the reservation to the east, and the desert the dude ranches had not yet sold. She exhibited at the Arizona State Fair and in the lobbies of the winter inns — the Jokake, the Ingleside — where eastern guests bought Arizona to take home, and she travelled the state with Zane Grey, whose novels were selling the same landscape in print. In the late 1960s the new Civic Center Library gave her a show in its mezzanine gallery, the town’s first public exhibition space, in a city that by then had a hundred galleries and had largely forgotten who came first.
She died in 1978, at about 93. The record of her life is thin — the Wickenburg retrospective of 2016 assembled it from scrapbooks and photographs — and this profile does not invent the details it lacks. What survives is the work, now in Western Spirit’s Southwest Women’s Art Collection, and the claim the city makes on its own timeline: “Scottsdale’s first artist Marjorie Thomas arrived from Boston.” Everything in the Main Street arts district descends from that cottage corner.