Betsy Bennett: A Cape Cod Treasure

A Retrospective of the Artist’s Work
at the Cape Cod Museum of Art

The Cape Cod Museum of Art, the regional art museum of Cape Cod, the Islands and Southeastern Massachusetts, will have a retrospective of the works of Betsy Bennet, known for her mastery of the egg tempera technique. The exhibition, which will feature paintings done in egg tempera and watercolors, will run from November 21 through January 17.

Bound, Betsy Bennett, 2000, Egg Tempera Published courtesy of CCMOA

Betsy was born in 1928, just before the Great Depression. Her formal art training began at age thirteen at the Philadelphia Art Museum and the Wayne Pennsylvania Art Association. After high school, she won a four-year scholarship to Moore College of Art in Philadelphia where she studied under Reginald Marsh, George Sklar, Will Barnet, and Frank Reilly. She later studied egg tempera technique with Robert Vickrey, the medium that continued to intrigue her years later.

In 1955, she moved to Cape Cod where she and her husband, Sid, raised three children. She began teaching watercolor, oil painting, and drawing in 1958 at Chatham, Harwich, and Dennis-Yarmouth adult education programs, plus substituting as an art teacher in the elementary and high schools of those three school districts. She also taught at the Cape Cod Art Association and the Nauset Painters.

Her richly detailed paintings of the region appeared in area galleries, and she was awarded one-person show status. Betsy's detailed architectural and natural renderings gained her "excellence in technique" awards and many firsts and best of shows in open juried shows, including first place awards from the Cape Cod Art Association, and the New England Open Juried Show at the South Shore Arts Center. She was also designated a Copley Master by the Copley Society of Boston.

In 1976, the Betsy and her family moved to the Oregon Coast, where she continued to teach and exhibit, receiving a first place in the Coos (Oregon) Art Museum Annual Juried Exhibition. Her work was influenced by years of coastal living, on both American coasts.

Returning to Cape Cod in 1993, she continued to paint in her studio in Harwich. She was on the Cape Cod Museum of Art’s Collections and Acquisitions Committee until a year prior to her death in 2007.

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