TORRINGTON – A California woman is coming to Goshen County this week hoping to track down surviving paintings by her great-grandmother, a pioneer schoolteacher who taught in one- and two-room rural schoolhouses around Torrington and Lingle in the early to mid-1900s — and who supported herself in part by selling her own artwork locally.
Lisa Matocq is searching for paintings by Marian (Walker) Vande Mark, who also went by Marion and painted under her maiden name, M.G. Walker. According to Matocq, her great-grandmother graduated college with a degree in mathematics in 1894, having also studied art, and went on to earn a master's degree before moving west and obtaining her teaching certificate.
“She was a remarkable woman for her time,” Matocq wrote in an email to the Telegram.
Vande Mark's biography is included in “Let Your Light Shine: Pioneer Women Educators of Wyoming,” a book Matocq said was published by the University of Wyoming in the early 1960s.
Matocq said her great-grandmother and her husband, Fred, homesteaded a ranch in Lingle, where Fred worked as a cattle and sheep rancher and road builder. After his death, Vande Mark moved to Torrington, where she lived for about 30 years until her death, in a home built in 1910 that is still standing. She later taught art classes at the University of Wyoming Center — now Eastern Wyoming College — and out of her own home, and served for a time as Lingle's city treasurer. She and Fred had five children.
Matocq's family once had four of Vande Mark's paintings, including the one pictured here, dated 1898. Two were destroyed in a fire, and two more were lost to flooding.
“We are just devastated to not have any of her amazing and historical artwork,” Matocq wrote.
Matocq will be in Torrington and Lingle from Tuesday, Sept. 15, through Sunday, Sept. 20, with her 80-year-old mother, checking local antique stores, thrift shops, consignment shops and historic buildings for any paintings that may have been purchased by local residents over the years and passed down since. The pair also plan to visit the family's former homestead ranch in Lingle and Vande Mark's Torrington home.
Anyone who owns or knows the location of a painting signed M.G. Walker, or with any other information on Marian (Walker) Vande Mark's artwork, can contact Matocq at lisamatocq@comcast.net.
