Mary Park Seavey Benton

{{Short description|American landscape painter (1815– 910)}}

{{Use mdy dates|date=March 2025}}

{{Infobox person/Wikidata|fetchwikidata=ALL|dateformat=mdy|image= Mary Park Benton A view of Yosemite Valley, circa 1855.jpg|caption=A View of Yosemite Valley, c. 1855}}

Mary Park Seavey Benton (August 10, 1815– December 6, 1910){{Cite book |last=Kovinick |first=Phil |url=https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaofwo0000kovi/ |title=An encyclopedia of women artists of the American West |date=1998 |publisher=Austin : University of Texas Press |others=Internet Archive |isbn=978-0-292-79063-6}} was an American landscape painter and educator. She was one of the first significant female artists in California.{{Cite book |last=Driscoll |first=John Paul |url=https://archive.org/details/allthatisgloriou00dris_0/ |title=All that is glorious around us : paintings from the Hudson River school |date=1997 |publisher=Ithaca : Cornell University Press |others=Cornell University Press |isbn=978-0-8014-3489-1}}

Mary Park Seavey was born on August 10, 1815 in Boston, Massachusetts and grew up in New York. In 1850 she married the Rev. John Eliot Benton, a Congregational clergyman.{{Cite book |last=Emerson |first=Wilimena Hannah Eliot |url=https://www.google.com/books/edition/Genealogy_of_the_Descendants_of_John_Eli/LysYAAAAMAAJ |title=Genealogy of the Descendants of John Eliot, "apostle to the Indians," 1598-1905 |last2=Eliot |first2=Ellsworth |last3=Eliot |first3=George Edwin |date=1905 |publisher=Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Press |language=en}} In 1852, he went to found a Congregational church at the Mission Delores in San Francisco, California. She and their daughter Mary joined them there in 1855. In the 1860s, moved to Sacramento and then Oakland, where John Benton was postmaster and editor of the Oakland Evening Tribune.

Mary Benton trained as an artist from an early age. She opened studios and exhibited in both New York and California, including a number of California state and local fairs. She worked as a teacher in San Francisco and Oakland. She painted numerous landscapes and portraits, including many views of California, primarily of San Francisco and Yosemite.{{Cite book |last=Moore |first=Sylvia |url=https://archive.org/details/yesterdaytomorro00moor/ |title=Yesterday and tomorrow : California women artists |date=1989 |publisher=New York : Midmarch Arts Press |others=Internet Archive |isbn=978-0-9602476-9-1}}

Mary Park Seavey Benton died on December 6, 1910 in Oakland, California.