Behind the Art: Greater Latrobe art collection includes founder's work

(Editor’s note: Behind the Art is a recurring series highlighting artistic works throughout the county.)

The Greater Latrobe School District owes its Special Art Collection to the vision of two teachers who, in the depths of the Great Depression, saw the value of exposing students to original works of art.

The efforts of Mary Martha Himler and James R. Beatty led to creation of a collection that is the largest in the United States to be entirely student-selected and, for the most part, student-purchased. It now comprises more than 200 artworks displayed in the senior and junior high and elementary buildings and is overseen by the GLSD Art Conservation Trust.

Beginning in 1936, students began voting annually on a work to be added to the collection. The student council leads efforts to raise purchasing funds.

Not only an educator, Himler was also an artist known mostly for her oil paintings. Three of her paintings were acquired by the collection in 1937, with a fourth added in 1942.

The last, titled “Recess,” depicts a group of children gathered around a teacher outside a rural, one-room schoolhouse — probably the site of Himler’s first teaching assignment in Derry Township near Keystone State Park.

“It’s a happy painting,” said Barbara Nakles, a member of the art conservation trust and its former longtime chair.

Nakles noted that amid the busy scene, one girl stands alone on the schoolhouse porch.

“I have a feeling that was Mary Martha,” she said. “Her father told her that, because she was shy, she’d never get anywhere.”

Two dogs face each other in the foreground, one of which probably was Himler’s.

“She always had a dog,” said Nakles, who grew up just down the street from Himler’s home in Latrobe, which she recalled was filled with the artist’s paintings stacked against the walls.

Himler’s fence was lined with sweet shrub bushes and Nakles would pick the fragrant flowers as she passed by.

“That little dog would always come out and bark at me,” she said.

Born in 1890 in Latrobe, Himler studied art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University). After graduating in 1928, she continued her education at University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University in New York City before returning home to teach.

In 1934, Himler received the alumnae prize from the University of Pittsburgh School of Design for the best painting by a woman artist.

Several of her works are in the collection of The Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg. Himler died in 1982.