Margaret Chalmers Baldwin

Margaret Chalmers Baldwin was born on June 25, 1873, in New Jersey. Baldwin studied art with a Civil War veteran in Holdrege, Nebraska, in 1890. She painted more than eighty canvases in her lifetime, and half of them belong to churches and chapels, including a mission chapel in India.

In 1914, Baldwin began painting religious subjects, mostly copies of paintings by other artists, such as Hans Hoffman’s Head of Christ, and Warner Sallman’s Christ at the Door of the Heart. She preferred to give her religious paintings to other people and churches as gifts.

Her husband, William Baldwin, was an artist-photographer, and she assisted him with his work. She also worked as a copyist and photographic retoucher in studios in Kansas City, Missouri.

In May 1954, Baldwin was honored as “Church Mother of the Year” by the Wesley Methodist Church in Kansas City. At this occasion, she presented the church with her copy of Plockhurst’s Christ the Good Shepherd.