Doll and Carriage attributed to Sylvia H. Irving (NY, 1878-1954), oil/grease pencil on artist board, circa 1930s-50s, framed - 19" x 17"
 
Sylvia H. Irving was a landscape painter, muralist, teacher, amateur playwright and musical composer/songwriter, primarily known for her oil paintings of landscapes, religious/spiritualist murals and spiritual/occult paintings. She was a descendant of the famous American author and landscape painter Washington Irving (Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow). After graduating from the Brooklyn Girls’ High School in 1895, Irving entered the Training School for Teachers. She became a teacher and later an assistant principal in several schools of the New York public school system. After retiring in 1934, Sylvia devoted most of her time to painting out of her home studio. She was known for mostly painting landscapes early on but later turned her attention to spiritual and religious paintings and later murals beginning in the mid-late 1930’s. In 1940 she exhibited 19 of her spiritual/religious mural paintings at famed Alma Reed’s Delphic Studios in New York City, where topics of the work covered "Reconciliation of All Religions", "World Peace" and "America's Destiny". Connoisseurs of art described her mural paintings as the ‘work of a genius’. She was also known to have painted spiritual paintings at the famous Lily Dale Assembly, “The World’s Largest Center for the Religion of Spiritualism."