Mary Foley Benson
American entomologist and scientific illustrator (1905–1992)
Mary Foley Benson (April 2, 1905 – June 18, 1992) was an American scientific illustrator and fine artist. She specialized in detailed, realistic watercolor paintings of plants and insects.
Early life, education and career
She was born in Storm Lake, Iowa, as Mary Carilla Foley. According to 1910 census, she had two brothers and two sisters. In 1922 she moved to Washington, D.C. to live with her family friends, John Merton Aldrich and Delia (Della) Ann Aldrich, and attend college. Developing interest in scientific illustration, she took a course in entomology with Dr. Aldrich, who at the time was the associate curator of insects at the United States National Museum. Possibly thanks to him, Foley soon got her first job at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). At the National School of Fine and Applied Arts and Corcoran School of Art she studied under artists Felix Mahoney and Harry Bradford respectively, and graduated in 1927.
In 1928, she married Russell Bernard Benson, a patent lawyer and engineer at the US Patent Office, and their son John Raymond Benson was born in 1931.
“Mary Foley Benson” enters the record as american entomologist and scientific illustrator (1905–1992). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Mary, Foley and Benson can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mary Foley Benson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.