Ella Peacock, often called the Matriarch of Utah artists, died June 24,1999 at the age of 93 years.
Born Ella Gillmer Smyth in Germantown, near Philadelphia, on September 30, 1905, Peacock was raised in a large Methodist family, attended private Quaker schools and enjoyed summers at the shore until her family fell on hard times. Her father was killed in an auto accident when she was thirteen years old; then his family's business failed in the early 1920s. Her father had advised his children to "choose carefully what we really wanted to do and get the best education we could", so she chose art school. She attended the Philadelphia School of Design for Women from 1924-1927 on a "private scholarship" from a family friend and graduated in 1927 with a degree in Illustration.Ella supported herself by working at a variety of jobs during the Depression, including carving frames and burnishing them with gold leaf for an art shop in Philadelphia, painting flowers on lamp shades for five cents a piece, and staining glass for cathedral windows. In the meantime she painted portraits and made wood-cut prints of the Philadelphia area whenever she could.
During the 1930s she saw the western desert for the first time on a road trip. She returned often with friends to paint and explore the western states. She fell in love with the desert during those years and always dreamed of moving away from the "too green land" of Pennsylvania to the "wonderful distances" of the Nevada and Utah desert.
Ella married an Englishman, William F. Peacock, in 1939 and two years later moved to Montgomery County, PA, where their son, William Bailey Peacock was born in 1944. They eventually bought a dairy farm in northern Pennsylvania and worked it for fifteen years. At the beginning of the second World War, Ella began to work as a draftsman, work she did until she retired in 1970. The Peacock family joined the Mormon Church while in Pennsylvania.
The family sold their dairy farm and left the East in 1964, settling for a few years in Salt Lake City and Miami where they both worked. They moved to Spring City in 1970 and enjoyed their lives there while Ella renewed her painting. Bill died in 1978, but Ella continued to support herself for the next nineteen years with her painting.
Ella Peacock never tired of looking at and painting the Sanpete Valley, always in her 1920s tonalist style with its muted palette of grayed blues and sage greens. In addition to her oil paintings she is well known for her hand carved frames she tinted with palette scrapings.
Peacock's work hangs in all the major museums in Utah and has been shown in galleries throughout the state, in Philadelphia and San Francisco. Peacock contributed a body of her paintings to Brigham Young University in 1987.
The funeral will be held at the Spring City Chapel at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, June 29, 1999. The family will receive friends that morning at 10 a.m. Interment will be at the Spring City Cemetery.
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