Neighbors: Polly & Braxton Mitchell

Neighbors: Polly & Braxton Mitchell

Elizabeth “Polly” Byrd Mitchell, the crab feast at Mitchell School of Fine Arts

The Hooper family has been fortunate over the years to have some remarkable neighbors. These are individuals who serve the collective good in extraordinary ways. One of our favorite couples in Ruxton, Maryland, was the Mitchells. Polly and Braxton were great fun and made for interesting discussions on the lane, we called home. Below are two separate documents (obituaries from the Baltimore Sun) which are knitted together into a single piece.

Elizabeth Steuart Thomas Byrd Mitchell

Elizabeth Byrd Mitchell, was our neighbor. She was a prominent Baltimore portrait painter and art teacher whose work was defined by its classical realism. Mrs. Mitchell, who was known as “Polly,” also was the founder of the Mitchell School of Fine Arts in the Bare Hills section of Baltimore County. She died of liver cancer at her Ruxton home. She was 73. [1]

Born Elizabeth Steuart Thomas Byrd in Baltimore and raised in Roland Park, she was a direct descendant of Charles Calvert, the third Lord Baltimore. As a teen-ager, she began attending Saturday classes at Maryland Institute College of Art and was exposed there to the European masters whose technique and use of color and light had a profound influence on her work.

She was a 1947 graduate of Roland Park Country School and earned a fine arts degree from the Maryland Institute in 1951. While attending the Maryland Institute, Polly studied under Jacques Moroger, former director of restoration at the Louvre in Paris. Moroger had rediscovered the formula and ingredients used by such 16th-century Dutch and Flemish masters as Rembrandt, Vandyke and Rubens. He was also the inspiration behind a group of local painters. Polly Mitchell was a member of Moroger’s local painters, known as the Baltimore Realists. Mrs. Mitchell also earned a diploma in 1969 and a master’s degree in fine arts in 1972, both from the Schuler School of Fine Art.

“Polly had all the essential elements of a successful portrait painter — outstanding quality and clarity in her technique, confidence, exuberance and extreme patience,” said Ann Didusch Schuler, a Baltimore artist who in 1959 co-founded the school at 5 E. Lafayette Ave. with her husband, Hans C. Schuler Jr.

Surrounded by the aromatic atmosphere of paint and turpentine, Mrs. Mitchell went about her work personally guiding and assisting students studying visual fine arts. “Though soft-spoken, she took command of a classroom with the effectiveness of a drill sergeant. She always prefaced criticism with a compliment and made sure that students understood the problem and how to fix it,” Mrs. Schuler said. “Students had great respect for her, and she brought out the best in each one. Polly was poised and a gentle lady, with the heart and soul of a master.”

A leading proponent of the classical realism school of portraiture, Mrs. Mitchell painted about 500 oil and pastel portraits during her career. Her clients included clergymen, judges, corporate executives and physicians.

Donald Ainslie Henderson, MD, by Elizabeth Byrd Mitchell

Mrs. Mitchell established her own school in 1965, first teaching students in the kitchen of her Ruxton home, after she had put her four sons to bed. Since 1988, the school — specializing in classical realism through a variety of media, including watercolors, pastels and oils — has been located on Falls Road in Bare Hills.

“She had great inner strength and a strong passion for art, which made her a very successful commission painter,” said Jeannie B. Park, a former student, artist and instructor at Mrs. Mitchell’s art school. “She worked fast and could complete a finished portrait in four to six weeks.”

Mrs. Mitchell was faculty chairwoman at her school, until retiring in 2002.

Eugene Davisson Lyon, MD by Elizabeth Byrd Mitchell

Nancy M. Valk, also an artist and instructor at the school, recalled her painstaking attention to the combined elements that went into a portrait. “She very much wanted to get a good likeness and concentrated on the initial drawing of the person. She also tried to find the pleasantness and good things in a person which she’d later capture in the portrait,” Mrs. Valk said. “She’d also spent lots of time talking to the individual, taking pictures, and visiting them at their homes or offices.”

Mitchell School of Fine Arts Sold

In the year 2000, Trevor Twist entered the scene. The Mitchell School was for quietly sale. Trevor Twist was a Baltimore native and graduate of the Boys’ Latin School of Maryland and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Twist bought the school and he is the owner and director of the Mitchell School, although that’s not the role he envisioned for himself as an art student. “I thought I’d go to New York and be a starving, if ultimately famous, artist,” said Twist, who was 35 and single at the time.

Instead of a typical sale of a company, the transaction was worked out with a phone call from Polly Byrd Mitchell to Trevor Twist. On that call, Mitchell indicated that her namesake School was for sale. In their conversation she mentioned a price that he could afford. He agreed with the arrangement and wondered if he would miss New York. One bright spot was that the purchase brought him back to Baltimore. “I decided I wanted to run my own school,” said Twist, who oversees a staff of six, five of whom, besides him, are teachers.

Polly Mitchell’s Work

Mrs. Mitchell’s work is found in private, corporate and institutional collections throughout the country. She especially created three pastels of our daughters Kathleen, Eleanor & Margaret (at age 6) when we lived down the lane from Polly and Braxton in the late 1990s. They are Hooper treasures. As Tracy Hooper says, “If the house were on fire, I would drop everything and pick up those Polly Mitchell pastels.”

Polly even painted a acrylic painting of our daughter, Margaret Hooper, for an art show she entered this close-up. It too is a family treasure.

Margaret Meriwether Hooper, by Polly Mitchell (1997)

Polly Mitchell was a founding member of Seven Women Realists, president of the Maryland Pastel Society and a member of the Charcoal Club and Maryland Portrait Society. She was also a member of the Ark and the Dove Society and the Colonial Dames of America.

At the time of her death, she was survived by her husband of 50 years, Braxton Dallam Mitchell, a retired publisher; their four sons, Braxton Dallam Mitchell Jr., Walter Byrd Mitchell and Thomas N. Mitchell, all of Towson, and Charles W. Mitchell of Lutherville; her mother, Elizabeth Steuart Thomas Byrd of Roland Park; a sister, Eleanor Byrd Nelson of Towson; and seven grandchildren.

Braxton D. Mitchell

Braxton Dallam Mitchell [2]

Braxton Mitchell was a retired publishing executive, who later in life served as the business manager of his wife’s Mitchell School of Fine Arts, located in Bare Hills section of Baltimore.

“Braxton was both modest and smart,” said the Rev. P. Kingsley Smith of Riderwood, the longtime rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Towson. “I’ve known him since 1957, and we served together in the Marines 4th Engineering Battalion Reserve unit; he was the executive officer, and I was chaplain. I always thought of Braxton as my best friend.” After serving 25 years in the Marine Corps, Mr. Mitchell retired in 1978 with the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Braxton Dallam Mitchell, son of Rear Adm. Charles W. “Jake” Mitchell Jr., a naval aviator who served in World Wars I and II, and his wife, Nannie Braxton Dallam, a homemaker, was born in Baltimore and raised in Norman, Oklahoma, and Jacksonville, Florida, where his father trained pilots.

He was a descendant of Carter Braxton of Virginia, a merchant, planter and politician whose signature is the bottommost on the Declaration of Independence.

After graduating in 1946 from Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, Mr. Mitchell earned a bachelor’s degree in 1950 from Princeton University. His nickname at Princeton was “Pasquale,” which must be like secret handshake. His classmates shortened his name to Pas. After college he served for three years on active duty with the Marine Corps and went to work in 1953 as assistant to the trade sales manager at Williams & Wilkins, a medical publisher founded in Baltimore in 1907.

Mr. Mitchell later worked in direct mail, retail and educational sales and advertising for a variety of books and journals while visiting faculty and bookstores across the nation. In 1962, he was named first director of the company’s export department, and during the next eight years built it into one of the best-known business units in the industry, giving Williams & Wilkins an international presence while establishing relationships with medical publishers throughout the world.

He left Williams & Wilkins in 1970 to open the office of University Park Press in Baltimore’s financial district, as Penn State University Press found its medical-book imports growing sufficiently to require a full-time professional to oversee its operation. He was later named general manager.

Other roles he took on included acquisitions manager, marketing manager and CFO. “During this period he established his bona fides as an editor, signing books such as “The Biology of Sea Snakes,” which filled a yawning chasm in the literature, and a number of his authors rose to prominent positions in American science and medicine,” according to a biographical profile of Mr. Mitchell submitted by his family.

Michael Urban of Urban & Schwarzenberg, a major German health-science publisher, approached Mr. Mitchell in 1976 and asked him to establish U & S’ American company, which included translating German medical books to sell in the U.S. and developing an English-language publishing program.

Mr. Mitchell became a much-in-demand speaker at publisher gatherings and served as a faculty member at educational seminars sponsored by the National Association of College Stores. He was an early supporter of the Association of American Publishers and served as its president from 1986 to 1987, and at its annual 1987 meeting introduced Sen. Edward M. Kennedy as its keynote speaker.

In 1990, he helped oversee the $13 million sale and transition of U & S to Waverly/Williams & Wilkins. He put off retirement and worked for a year, or so he thought, with Taylor & Francis, a British publisher, to manage its American operations in Washington and Philadelphia. He finally retired in 1994.

Victoria “Vickie” Hansard, who lives in Alexandria, Virginia, and was a longtime colleague, considered Mr. Mitchell to be her mentor. “We worked together for 12 years, from 1973 to 1985,” Ms. Hansard said. “I started as a secretary, and he very graciously helped me climb the ladder. They used to say that publishing was a gentlemen’s business, and he epitomized that and everyone who met him knew that.” Ms. Hansard, who followed Mr. Mitchell from Williams & Wilkins to Urban & Schwarzenberg, went into marketing.

“It was before the ‘Me Too Movement’ and I had been in some pretty awkward situations, but Braxton was never like that. He was just the nicest man I had ever met, and even though I have a father I love, he was like a surrogate father to me. We really lost one of the good ones when he died.”

In 1952, Braxton married the former Elizabeth Steuart Thomas Byrd, who became a prominent Baltimore portrait painter and art teacher, and who established the Mitchell School of Fine Arts in the kitchen of her Ruxton home and later moved it to the Bare Hills neighborhood of Baltimore County.

In his retirement, he made frames in his basement workshop and served as business manager of his wife’s school. Polly Mitchell died in 2002. Four years later Braxton married Margaret “Meg” Taylor, who was a great late-in-life companion. Meg Taylor Mitchell died in 2011.

Mr. Mitchell was longtime active communicant of the Episcopal Church of the Holy Comforter in Lutherville, where he was senior warden, a vestryman and a lay reader. “He was a good leader and a very generous person. He was generous to Holy Comforter, Exeter and Princeton alumni groups,” Father Smith said. “Braxton was also a very cheerful guy who had a great sense of humor, and he certainly laughed at my jokes.”

Mr. Mitchell enjoyed puns and collecting limericks and would often write them in observance of family occasions, which could at times “cause an eye roll,” family members said. For years, Mr. Mitchell ran the Marine Corps’ Toys for Tots program.

He was a founding member of the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He also served on the board of the Anna Emory Warfield Fund, which provides financial assistance to women in need, and on the board of the James Lawrence Kernan Hospital.

Mr. Mitchell was a member and former governor of the Society of Colonial Wars in the State of Maryland and was also a member of the Society of Descendants of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence.

A lifelong sailor, Mr. Mitchell enjoyed sailing on the Chesapeake Bay and exploring its rivers and tributaries, and in the winter in the Caribbean. He was a member of the Gibson Island Yacht Squadron, L’Hirondelle Club and the Bachelors Cotillon. Along with Father Smith, he was a member of the Home Before Naps Club, whose members would visit a cultural or historic site, have lunch, and then go home in time for naps.

He is survived by four sons, Braxton D. “Brackie” Mitchell Jr. of Chatterleigh, Charles W. “Charley” Mitchell of Parkton, Walter B. Mitchell of Ruxton and Thomas N. Mitchell of Towson; seven grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Originally Published: October 29, 2020.