Alberta Binford McCloskey navigated one of the more challenging courses through a career in art. Apparently self-trained, Alberta Binford McCloskey forged a painting career in tandem with her husband, the portrait painter and still-life specialist William J. McCloskey, before separating from him and embarking on a successful career of her own. Alberta Binford McCloskey’s tenacity and ambition were all the more impressive given her single-mother status and the fact that she was effectively maimed because of a childhood infirmity or injury that stunted her growth and disfigured her spine.
The birthplace and date of Alberta Binford McCloskey are not precisely known. McCloskey scholar Nancy Moure reasons that Alberta was probably born about 1855 in Missouri to a family with Southern roots (Moure, p. 13). The Binfords moved frequently, setting up residence in Texas, Missouri, Iowa, Tennessee, and again in Missouri, where they remained until about 1880, when Alberta Binford was about twenty-five years old. Around this time the Binfords moved to Los Angeles, California, but young Alberta split from her family and instead moved to Denver, Colorado, establishing herself there as a professional artist. What motivated her to move to Denver and not Los Angeles is not known, and no record of Alberta Binford’s training in art has been discovered. Binford soon met William McCloskey, a young artist recently arrived from Philadelphia who had studied there with Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, at a weekly soirée at a Denver patron’s studio space. McCloskey was teaching at the nascent Colorado Academy of Design (now the Denver Academy of Art), which was founded in February 1882. The two young artists fell instantly into a romance and were married in March 1883. One year later Binford McCloskey gave birth to her daughter, Eleanor.
In the early summer of 1884, the McCloskeys traveled to Los Angeles, where Alberta reunited with her family. Though Alberta and William appear to have prospered in Los Angeles, they were restless and moved, in 1886, to New York. This was the first of several such cross-country moves for the couple.
The McCloskeys left New York in 1891 and returned to San Francisco. In 1892, they were in London, England, but remained there only briefly, moving on to Paris by the end of the year. By 1893 they had returned to the United States and made their way to the Pacific coast back to Los Angeles. The McCloskeys continued their nomadic existence throughout the years of their marriage, sometimes on the West Coast, sometimes in New York and occasionally in Europe. Around 1898, the couple separated. (There is no record of a divorce, and it would have been unlikely insofar as William McCloskey was a Catholic and Alberta is believed to have converted prior to marriage.) Alberta remained in San Francisco with their two children, Eleanor, born in 1884, and William, Jr., born in 1889, while William returned home to his family in Philadelphia.
