Born in central Illinois in 1883, Fern Isabel Coppedge loved painting from an early age while watching her sister Effa paint in a watercolour class and with whom she visited museums. Coppedge completed her education in California and Kansas, and after marrying Robert Coppedge and relocating to Topeka in 1904, she enrolled in the Chicago Art Institute. She eventually moved to New York, studying under Frank Vincent DuMond and with American Impressionist William Merritt Chase at the Art Students League. Coppedge was the only female member of the New Hope School and studied further at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts under Daniel Garber and with John Carlson at the Woodstock Art Colony in 1917, where she developed her brushstrokes and colour palette.
Coppedge formed a deep connection with Pennsylvania since it strongly reminded her of Kansas, where she grew up. Throughout her life, she would maintain studios and homes in Philadelphia, Lumberville and New Hope. She was a member of the Philadelphia Ten, an organization that championed women artists and exhibited their works. Organizations such as these allowed women artists to break into the male-dominated art world, pursue careers as artists, and enabled them to build a network of clients. She would exhibit with them and participate in a women’s resistance movement from 1922 until 1935. She began to spend summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1916, painting its coastal landscapes, boats and ports and developed a love for painting “en plein air”, with most of her landscapes completed in the winter. Her works convey a unique perspective, which she translates by rearranging her compositions to reflect her views while using the distinctive thick brushwork and focus on landscape painting that characterized Pennsylvania Impressionism. Her works ultimately capture the changing effects of light upon the landscape by adopting a visionary use of colour and a two-dimensional abstract style. Her artworks can be found in the collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum and the Michener Museum.
