Mary Foley Benson (April 2, 1905 – June 18, 1992) was an American scientific illustrator and fine artist. She specialized in detailed, realistic watercolor paintings of plants and insects.
Early life, education and career
She was born in Storm Lake, Iowa, as Mary Carilla Foley. According to 1910 census, she had two brothers and two sisters. In 1922 she moved to Washington, D.C. to live with her family friends, John Merton Aldrich and Delia (Della) Ann Aldrich, and attend college. Developing interest in scientific illustration, she took a course in entomology with Dr. Aldrich, who at the time was the associate curator of insects at the United States National Museum. Possibly thanks to him, Foley soon got her first job at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). At the National School of Fine and Applied Arts and Corcoran School of Art she studied under artists Felix Mahoney and Harry Bradford respectively, and graduated in 1927.
In 1928, she married Russell Bernard Benson, a patent lawyer and engineer at the US Patent Office, and their son John Raymond Benson was born in 1931. The couple lived in the D.C. area, and build their house the same year at Riggs Road, Langley Park, in Maryland. Mary Foley Benson worked as the senior scientific illustrator for the USDA's Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine and the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. She collaborated with and illustrated for entomologists such as Lee L. Buchanan, Harrison Gray Dyar Jr., Carl Heinrich, Donald De Leon, Ashley Buell Gurney, R. A. Cushman, August Busck, Harry Gardner Barber, Louise M. Russell, Alan Stone, E. G. Davis, and George Paul Engelhardt. The majority of these illustrations were technical, black and white drawings of insects such as wasps, moths, true bugs, crickets, flies, weevils, roaches, and scale insects.
During her free time, in the late 1920s and during the 1930s she participated in theater and music shows, notably the Pierce Hall Players. Thanks to her younger brother Charles L. Foley who was in the aviation business, she became interested in flying, and started taking piloting classes at College Park airport in 1936. Already in 1937, she had her first flight and was second at the annual Langley Day air meet, as part of Washington Air Derby. At that time, she was the only (and possibly the first) women trustee of the Washington Aero Club.
WWII piloting and move to California
Already a licensed pilot, when the WWII started Mary Foley Benson joined the Civil Air Patrol and began ferrying airplanes for the War Training Service, joining her brother at Roosevelt Field. This led to her 1943 enlistment in the U.S. Army Air Corps (Women’s Army Corps) and the famous Ninety-Nines: International Organization of Women Pilots, the latter founded by Amelia Earhart in 1929. She flew Taylor J-2 Cub, Piper J-4 Cub Coupe, and Fairchild 24 aircraft, serving as the "on-ground Link Celestial Navigation Trainer." Unfortunately, women pilots were not allowed to teach in the air at the time. According to her biography in an 1946 exhibition catalog, "so far as is known [she] is the only women with an Army M.O.S. [Military Occupational Specialty] as pilot."
With the end of the war, she divorced and moved to Los Angeles area to be with her parents. "She overstayed her time limit [at the USDA] and lost her job," and reinvented herself as a commercial artist, painting plants and clowns. Between 1948 and 1951, she attended the Otis Art Institute and studied under artist Norman Rockwell.
UC Davis
In 1964, she moved to Davis, California, thanks to a job offer from professor Howard Lester McKenzie from the Department of Entomology at University of California, Davis (UC Davis). This occurred only one year after UC Davis' department became independent from UC Berkeley, under Richard M. Bohart as chair. McKenzie and Foley Benson collaborated on the well-know publication Mealybugs of California with Taxonomy, Biology and Control of North American Species (Homoptera: Coccoidea: Pseudococcidae) which came out in 1967. These watercolor illustrations feature mealybugs on their host plants and surrounding habitats, together with plant damage, identified by specific locations of collecting, dates, collectors, and species. Other illustrators who contributed to this publication, aside from Foley Benson and McKenzie himself, were Helen C. Court, Julia Z. Iltis, and Douglass R. Miller.