Margaret May Dashiell (7 January 1867–11 February 1958), artist, was the daughter of Mary Taylor May and Thomas P. May, a planter who edited the Unionist New-Orleans Times in 1863–1864 and published three novels after the Civil War. Obituaries and burial records give her birth year as 1869, but her age as recorded in various public documents indicates that 1867 is the correct year. She may have been born at the family plantation in Saint John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana, where she was enumerated in the 1870 census, but she spent most of her early childhood in New Orleans and attended a Catholic school for girls there. The family experienced a decline in fortune as a result of Thomas May's supposed mismanagement of a New Orleans bank and lived in England early in the 1880s. After her father died, May, with her mother and younger brothers, moved to Richmond about 1885. On 15 June 1889 she married John Parker Dashiell, a merchant whose elder half brother was married to the educational reformer Landonia Randolph Minor Dashiell. They had one son.

Dashiell studied informally with the Richmond sculptor Edward Virginius Valentine. She joined the Art Club of Richmond and displayed her work at its annual exhibitions beginning in the 1890s. Working primarily in pen and ink and in watercolors, Dashiell created hundreds of drawings and paintings featuring local landmarks and people of Richmond, New Orleans, and Charleston, South Carolina. Believing that particular types of southerners were disappearing from modern life, she set out to record the vanishing ways of the Old South. Like many other regional artists and writers who extolled a Lost Cause mythology, Dashiell wanted to preserve a sense of "the aristocracy of the South" that was passing from memory. She sketched Richmond's aging Confederate veterans and domestic scenes of upper-class white families, but she focused especially on such black domestic workers as cooks, housemaids, and the popular "mammy" figure, as well as flower vendors at the local markets and other African American workers who evoked a disappearing era. Dashiell returned several times to New Orleans, which inspired her watercolors of praline and rice-cake sellers, voodoo rituals, and cemeteries. Her sketches usually tightly focus on individuals or a particular activity. Dashiell presented her subjects with affection and a sense of dignity and sometimes annotated her sketches with phrases, verse, or dialogue in dialect. Her work was often exhibited in Richmond, as well as in Hampton, Lynchburg, Charleston, New Orleans, and Cleveland, Ohio, and drew praise from contemporaries for capturing the unique atmosphere of the South.

Dashiell provided illustrations for a variety of publications, including two written in stereotyped African American dialect, Uncle Jerry's Platform and Other Christmas Stories (1897), by Gillie Cary, and a reprinting of Irwin Russell's 1878 poem, Christmas-Night in the Quarters (1948). Famous Recipes from Old Virginia, a cookbook the Ginter Park Woman's Club published in 1935 and 1941, included her images of Richmond residents. She created vignettes for Roberta Trigg's novel about the Brontë sisters, Haworth Idyll: A Fantasy (1946). Dashiell compiled and illustrated an engagement calendar of seventeenth-century Virginia scenes for a local printing company in 1903 and designed at least one Christmas card used by her friend, the novelist Ellen Glasgow. Her sketches also appeared in such periodicals as the Los Angeles Saturday Night and Cartoons Magazine.

Dashiell wrote and illustrated Spanish Moss and English Myrtle (1920), a volume of sentimental verses employing African American dialect and Creole language to portray scenes of her native city and adopted home. Her story Richmond Reverie (1942) nostalgically portrayed the affectionate relationship between a white family and its black servants. She also completed and illustrated several stories for children that were not published.

A collector of French fashion plates, Dashiell sold prints, books, art, and antiques at the Serendipity Shop, which she owned and operated for at least fifteen years beginning about 1915. Her dog could often be found at the shop with her. As an animal lover, Dashiell served for many years on the board of directors of the Richmond Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, to which she was elected in September 1900, and often created artwork for use in the society's fund-raising.

Widowed after her husband's sudden death on 19 December 1930, Dashiell continued to travel, write, draw, and exhibit her art during the next two decades. In 1936 she worked as a mimeograph operator for the Richmond division of the College of William and Mary (later Virginia Commonwealth University). Having suffered from arteriosclerosis and dementia during her final years, Margaret May Dashiell died at a Richmond retirement home on 11 February 1958 and was buried in Hollywood Cemetery. During her lifetime she had given collections of her artwork to several Richmond institutions, including the University of Richmond and the Valentine, as well as to the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina. The Gibbes Museum of Art, in Charleston, the Historic New Orleans Collection, the Virginia Historical Society, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts also hold examples of her art in their permanent collections.

Sources Consulted:
Biographies in R. Lewis Wright, "Margaret Dashiell Depicts the South," Richmond Quarterly 5 (fall 1982): 46–50, and Robert B. Mayo, Margaret May Dashiell (1869–1958): Recent Discovery of Watercolors and Drawings, 19 Nov. 1997–17 Jan. 1998 exhibition catalog, Mayo Gallery, Richmond (copy in Dictionary of Virginia Biography files, Library of Virginia); correspondence, MSS, and artwork in Margaret May Dashiell Papers at Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, N.C., at Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University, New Orleans, La., and at the Valentine, Richmond, Va.; United States Census Schedules, Saint John the Baptist Parish, La., 1870 (age three in July), New Orleans Parish, La., 1880 (age thirteen in June), and Richmond City, 1900 (birth date of Jan. 1867), all in Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; Marriage Register, Richmond City (age twenty-two on 15 June 1889), Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; Richmond Daily Times, 16 June 1889; Richmond Times-Dispatch, 13 May 1923 (quotation), 22, 25 Mar. 1925, 13 Aug. 1933, 8 July 1934, 15 Jan. 1943 (portrait); Richmond News Leader, 14, 15 Nov. 1940, 10 Dec. 1953, 17 July 1984; obituaries (with variant birth date of 7 Jan. 1869) in Richmond News Leader, 11 Feb. 1958, and Richmond Times-Dispatch, 12 Feb. 1958.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Diana Thompson Vincelli.

How to cite this page:
Diana Thompson Vincelli,"Margaret May Dashiell (1867–1958)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2016 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Dashiell_Margaret_May, accessed [today's date]).

Return to the Dictionary of Virginia Biography Search page.