Susanne Yardley Mason Thompson
Susanne Yardley Mason Thompson, an artist of wide-ranging skill and former longtime resident of Amagansett, died of a heart attack on Tuesday, May 8, at the Peebles Hospital in Roadtown, Tortola, British Virgin Islands, where she had lived for the last 19 years. She was 85.
East End residents may remember her numerous art exhibits at local galleries, her elegant style, independent spirit, and abiding love of the sea. In addition to her portraits and large abstract landscapes, she applied her sense of beauty to designing gardens and collecting antiques and objects of interest from other cultures.
Ms. Thompson was born April 11, 1927, in South Orange, New Jersey. She grew up in an oceanfront Queen Anne cottage on what was called Quaker Row in nearby Sea Girt, where she lived with her parents, John and Margaret Willets Mason, her twin brother, John, and her sisters, Martha and Carolyn.
The love for the ocean that she developed in childhood later expressed itself in her painting. She attended Friends Seminary in New York City and George School, a Friends School in Newtown, Pennsylvania. After graduation in 1945, she went on to the Art Students League in New York. Later she studied with William von Schlegell, an American Impressionist, in his studio in Mamaroneck, and also at the Ogunquit Art School in Ogunquit, Maine.
She traced her artistic talent to her grandfathers—to John Mason, an inventor, painter and designer in silver for Tiffany & Co., and Edmund Willets, founder of the renowned china company Willets Belleek in Trenton, N.J.
In 1947, she married Robert P. Thompson, her husband of 20 years and the father of her four children. After they divorced, She moved to a converted potato barn in Amagansett, where she lived for the next two decades with her partner, the builder and writer Ed Morgan. During this same period she showed her large paintings in numerous galleries and museums, including Guild Hall, the Benson Gallery, and the Pellicone Gallery in Manhattan. She was nominated for an award at the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters 1980 exhibition in New York.
Her creative life included gardening, landscape design and architecture. With Mr. Morgan, she designed and built a second, Palladian-style home in Amagansett. In 1993, the two resettled in Tortola, where they designed and built two more residences, both with panoramic views of the sea.
Downsizing her art in the new surroundings, she began working with fabric collage, reverse paintings on glass, and, most recently, computer art. Her computer images bring exuberant color to the sailboats, seascapes and tropical gardens that were such an important part of her life. Mr. Morgan died in Tortola in 2010.
Ms. Thompson is survived by her children, John Willets Thompson of Arizona, Theodore Robert Thompson of Pennsylvania; Margaret Pyle Thompson of East Hampton, and Amy Richards Thompson of Pennsylvania, as well as four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
on Jun 1, 2012