Mabel Dwight (1875–1955) was an American artist whose lithographs showed scenes of ordinary life with humor and tolerance. Carl Zigrosser, who had studied it carefully, wrote that "Her work is imbued with pity and compassion, a sense of irony, and the understanding that comes of deep experience." Between the late 1920s and the early 1940s, she achieved both popularity and critical success. In 1936, Prints magazine named her one of the best living printmakers, and a critic at the time said she was one of the foremost lithographers in the United States.

Born in Cincinnati and raised in New Orleans, she moved with her parents to San Francisco in the late 1880s. There, she studied with Arthur Mathews at the Mark Hopkins Institute. Early in 1899, a critic for a local weekly magazine called The Wave said her portraits were the best ones in the show, "being handled with a degree of delicacy and feeling characteristic of the true colorist." Later that year, she joined and became a director of the San Francisco Sketch Club. In 1898, she drew the illustration for the cover of the club's exhibition catalog, shown here, Image No. 1. Two years later, she received a commission for a portrait from a monthly review called The Critic. At about the same time, still living with her parents, she moved to Manhattan, and there a publisher commissioned her to make illustrations for a book about animals in the western United States. Her thirteen drawings included a frontispiece of deer, shown here, Image No. 2. A critic called the pictures "delightful", adding that they would appeal to readers old and young.

In her mid-20s she accompanied Helen Bartlett Bridgman, wife of the explorer Herbert Lawrence Bridgman, on a world tour including stops in Egypt, Ceylon, India, Java, and Great Britain. Returning to the United States in 1903, she rejoined her parents in Greenwich Village. For the next few years she continued her efforts to establish herself as a professional artist and, from 1903 to 1906, listed herself in the American Art Annual as a painter and illustrator. She met and in 1906 married fellow artist Eugene Patrick Higgins. Although they were both socialists, and hence espoused equality of the sexes, Dwight fell into the role of helpmate and stopped painting.

Dwight and Higgins had no children. In 1917, they separated and she resumed her painting career. The following year, she joined Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's newly founded Whitney Studio Club and became secretary to Juliana Force, the club's director. Over the next few years she attended life drawing sessions and showed at annual exhibitions that the club held. Although she made some experiments with etching, she worked mainly in watercolor at this time. When she showed a painting called Nocturne at a club exhibition in December 1918, a critic for American Art News called it a "black picture" that had "a nude female figure of uncommon line and tone." In 1923, she made a watercolor of a subject that would later reappear as one of her best-known lithographs. Showing people at a public aquarium, it was, a critic said, "both amusing and competently handled." The critic praised another of her paintings, called Portrait of a Man, for its "fine characterization" and rich color that "functions definitely in the achievement of form." Reviewing another Whitney Club show, in 1926, a critic for the New York Sun said "Miss Dwight is a wit and in her paintings of subjects seized in the subway, the parks, and other public places weaves in a lot of insidious criticism of her fellow citizens."

Dwight reached the age of 50 in 1925. She met the New York art print dealer Carl Zigrosser sometime before the outbreak of World War I, and, with his encouragement, traveled to Paris in 1926 to spend a year studying lithographic art in the Atelier Duchatel. While in Paris, she made sketches showing people engaged in everyday activities—watching puppet shows, sitting in cafés, worshiping, browsing stalls by the Seine—and worked up the sketches into lithographic prints. In their posture and gestures as much as their facial expressions, the characters she depicted showed their personalities and individual foibles. A watercolor she called Chess on Deck, shown here, Image No. 3, was probably made either on her outbound or inbound voyage. She made the lithograph called Basque Church, shown here, Image No. 4, while she was abroad. When the Philadelphia Print Club showed Dwight's complete lithographic works in 1929, C.H. Bonte, a critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, drew attention to prints of French scenes such as this, saying "She is above all interested in people and their characters. Rich is the skill which has been employed in giving individual distinction to all the details of this human comedy, for it is surely comedy as Miss Dwight sees it."

Within a year of her return, the Paris prints and the ones she began to make in New York helped to establish her as one of America's best lithographic artists. In 1928, Zigrosser arranged for her to be given a first solo exhibit. That year, a critic for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted that she had a "flair for the fantastic and romantic and can stir the imagination". The critic added, "Mabel Dwight, whose exhibition is being held at the Weyhe Galleries, has already won considerable reputation for herself in this medium" adding that she was "apt to respond to the humorous aspect of life." In 1929 the Print Club of Philadelphia gave her a solo exhibition including all the prints she had made in Paris, Chartres, and New York through the end of the previous year. In a lengthy review, Margaret Breuning of the New York Evening Post wrote that the show contained "gay happy lithographs accomplished by a true artist, whose affectionate pulse is nicely attuned to the heartbeats of those she so faithfully depicts."

A lithograph made in 1928 called Deserted Mansion was one of her first prints to attract substantial notice. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle critic called attention to it and her other "emotional pictures of deserted old houses". A critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that she had infused the subject with a "sensed spirit of mystery" and thereby accomplished an "emotional trick of picture making". Dwight later said the place reminded her of Jane Eyre, adding, "The upper windows were not boarded or shuttered, and they looked at one with that insane expression which windows of long empty houses acquire." This print is shown here, Image No. 5.

A lithograph Dwight made in 1929 called Ferry Boat was chosen by the Institute of Graphic Arts as one of its "Fifty Prints of the Year". In 1931, a critic said it was "highly amusing in its satire." Writing in the New York Times, Edward Alden Jewell considered it one of her notable works in 1932 and in 1937 said it was then considered to be "long familiar". A few years later, in a review of four contemporary printmakers, Zigrosser called this lithograph "immortal". In 1930, Fortune magazine commissioned her to illustrate an article called "To Make a Circus Pay". The illustration she made for the first two pages of the piece are shown here, Image No. 7. When, in 1932, she was given a second solo exhibition at the Weyhe Gallery, she showed watercolors and drawings as well as her prints. The show drew from Edward Alden Jewell an evaluation of her capacity to evoke a range of moods in her work. He wrote that she depicted mansions that had become "solemn ghosts" along with graveyards and other somber subjects, but also presented "frankly carefree", even "hilarious" works showing circuses and rent parties. Between the extremes, he cited pictures, such as Ferry Boat, that had become "more comfortable" to viewers.