TAWA at 45
The Exhibition
Peggy Peplow Gummere
John Gummere
oil on canvas, 1970; 32″h x 48″w; Collection of John and Sue Gummere
Peggy Peplow Gummere (1912-1992) was born and raised in Trenton and lived there until she retired to Maine at the end of her life. She began making art as a child and was encouraged in it while she attended Eden Hall, a boarding school run by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart in the Torresdale section of Philadelphia. After high school she enrolled in the four-year Certificate Program at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she majored in illustration and studied with Daniel Garber and other notable artists.
While at PAFA she was awarded the prestigious Cresson Traveling Scholarship and spent two summers studying with Jean Despujols at the École des Beaux-Arts in Fontainebleau, France. Traveling in Europe between the wars gave her a rare view of history in the making, which shows in her many lithographic crayon drawings at the time. With Garber and others, PAFA in the early twentieth century had a strong impressionist influence, but Despujols’ painting tended more toward a classical style that became dominant in Gummere’s work. She created illustrations for a variety of local clients, and in the 1960s she taught art at St. Anthony’s High School and Stuart School in Princeton. In the early 1970s she created the “Trenton Suite,” a series of limited-edition prints of her ink drawings of Trenton landmarks. For the 1976 Bicentennial, Lenox produced her “Patriots Bowl,” a limited-edition porcelain whose concept she based on the shape of a Paul Revere silver bowl; it had five of her miniature portraits of leaders of the period of the Revolution. Gummere was best known around Trenton and Princeton for her portraits of the area’s civic, business, and religious leaders. Several of her portraits of state judges hang in the Richard J. Hughes Justice Complex on Market Street.
Gummere was a good friend of Ben Whitmire; they frequently consulted on a variety of artistic projects, and she spent many hours with Ben looking over Ellarslie during its restoration. She joined TAWA at its founding. Gummere’s values included a commitment to social justice, racial equality, and support for her community; among her other efforts, she was a strong supporter of the Trenton Free Library to promote education and literacy. She would be proud to see that Ellarslie is thriving in 2023!