April Artist of the Month – Margaret White Northrup

Please come to a reception Friday, April 18th from 5-7 pm, to meet the family and see Margaret’s art.

The Art of Margaret White Northrup, a resident of Stockbridge MA for 60 years, is on display at the Stockbridge Library during the month of April, 2025. Margaret was professionally trained at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. While raising 5 children she continued painting and drawing, but did not show her work. After her death in 2020, at age 97, her children discovered her hidden portfolios, a treasure we are proud to unveil at the Stockbridge Library during the month of April. The family will host a reception at the library on Friday, April 18th from 5-7 PM.

BIOGRAPHY
Margaret Ann White Northrup was born in 1923 into an Irish Catholic family on a
small, working farm in Holliston, Massachusetts, the 4th of 8 children.
Margaret had a special gift for art, music and dance, and a taste for solitude.  Her
family recognized her gift and gave her a small attic bedroom with its own private
exit (a 2nd- story window)!  She was professionally trained at the Massachusetts
College of Art in Boston, where she experienced an explosion of expressive
creativity, making drawings and paintings of people that seem to bring them to
life.  A selection of these is being shown in the Stockbridge Library exhibit space
April 1_ 30, 2025, with a reception on Friday, April 18th from 5-7 pm.
During World War II, Margaret joined the army. Though she lost the chance to
practice her art, she trained as a draftsman, and when the war was over, she got
a job making engineering drawings at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
There, in the listening room at the MIT Music Library, she met Gordon Northrup.
Gordon had been working as a physicist and radar technician, but decided after
the devastation of war, to study Psychiatry. He and Margaret got married and
began their family of 5 children, and he went back to school for a medical degree,
moving to California for an internship and residencies.  As the family grew
Margaret struggled to find time to make art. She was frustrated during those
years, yearned for time alone and hid what she had already done.
Once Gordon finished his training in 1960, he got a job as Founding Director of
the Berkshire Children’s Clinic and they moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
Their move to Villa Favorita marked a change. Gordon started a chamber music
group and they both began to sing in several choruses. Margaret began to draw
and paint again, exploring Japanese papers and painting techniques. Both found
satisfying work, music, art and friends in Stockbridge- a long journey to a place
they could call home!
Margaret never revealed her early art to her children, and after her death we
found a treasure trove of beautiful drawings, languishing in the non-climate-
controlled attic, needing conservation, restoration, and framing. A number of
these works are on display at the Stockbridge Library for the month of April,
2025, in hopes that some of Margaret and Gordon’s old friends will see the show
and find out who Margaret really was!

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