(3) animal Etchings by female artists 2 by African American Artist Elsa Libby Maine Mississippi signed, 1 by Mary Cooper Back Wyoming artist 1930 of a dog signed "Topsy" 4 x 5" image size, 2 by Elsa Libby, a dog and a cat signed circa 1930, 6 x 5" image size
Elsa Libby was born in 1909 and lived in Maine and Mississippi. She is in the collection of the Chadwick Boseman College of Fine Arts at Howard University in Washington, D.C.. It is part of the James A. Porter Collection.
Mary Cooper was from Chicago, Illinois and trained at the Art Institute of Chicago but she is known as a Wyoming artist.
Mary Cooper Back was not a Wyoming native, but she was one of many young women drawn here inexorably by falling in love with a cowboy. Dubois remembers her most fondly as an artist, but at various points in her life she was nearly everything that bespeaks Wyoming: homesteader, dude rancher, naturalist and wildlife biologist, taxidermist, carpenter, dude ranch owner, pack-trip outfitter, and avid hiker. She was also an amateur philosopher, a lay minister, and even a certified aircraft mechanic.Born in Minneapolis in 1906 and raised in Vermont, Mary met her future husband Joe Back, a cowhand from Dubois who loved to sketch, at the Art Institute of Chicago. Joe had come to the Art Institute with the help of an artist who met him at a dude ranch.Mary had also been a habitual sketcher in childhood, and in college she had a job as an illustrator for the biology department. Art and wildlife were her two passions ever after. Her parents moved to Chicago while she was in college, and afterwards she worked as a taxidermist at the Academy of Sciences and as an intern at the Field Museum of Natural History, where she took a class on the structure of animal bones and muscles. Joe and Mary shared a crazy dream: Move to Wyoming and make a living from their art. They married in 1933, and remained in Chicago for a while. Mary worked as curator of the new Trailside Museum in River Forest, which was a refuge for injured animals. When animals died, she sketched them and then preserved their remains with taxidermy.

6 x 5 x 3 in

10 lb