Tulip Grove

Mayna Treanor Avent was the daughter of Thomas O. and Mary Andrews Treanor.  She was born on September 17, 1868, at Tulip Grove Mansion, across Lebanon Pike from Andrew Jackson's Hermitage, near Nashville, Tennessee.  Winters at Tulip Grove were cold and one of Mayna’s earliest memories was apples picked from the nearby grove freezing in the attic in the winter where they were stored.

Mayna - A Family Name

Mayna’s given first name was actually Mary. However, as a young child, so the family story goes, she pronounced it as “May-na.”  Hence, a family name was born and passed down through the generations.  Her daughter was named Mary but two of her granddaughters were named Mayna.

An Artist’s Life

Study at Cincinnati was followed by two years at the Julian Academy in Paris.  In 1891 she married Frank Avent, a Murfreesboro attorney who later served as State Railroad Commissioner for many years.  He died in 1941.

Avent taught painting in Nashville for many years and exhibited throughout the United States.  Besides Tennessee, she painted in Massachusetts and South Carolina.  She produced oil and watercolor paintings, drawings and wood block prints in the Japanese manner.  She was a member of the Nashville Studio Club, the Nashville Artists Guild, and the Centennial Club, which in 1951 held a retrospective exhibition of her sixty-eight year artistic career.  She died at Sewanee, Tennessee on January 2, 1959. 

An anecdote of Avent's early life recounts how she was given an armful of magnolias and decided to paint them at once.  Finding no unused canvas about, she removed a wooden door panel and painted on it, later explaining “Magnolias just won't wait!” Besides still lifes, her favorite subjects were landscapes (especially Tennessee wheat fields) and Negro studies. 

References

 Tennessee Painting—The Past (catalogue of an exhibition at the Tennessee Fine Arts Center at Cheekwood, May 22-July 31, 1960). Dictionary of American Artists, 19th and 20th Century (Poughkeepsie, N. Y. , 1982; repr.  from 1929 American Art Annual), 18; Nashville Tennessean, January 3, 1959 (obit.)