Blanche McVeigh
Fort Worth Circle
American, (1895–1970)
Blanche McVeigh, printmaker and art teacher, was born in 1895 in St. Charles, Missouri, and moved to Fort Worth, Texas, while still a child. After graduating from Washington University in Missouri, she returned to Fort Worth and taught elementary school there for several years, after which she decided to become a professional artist and studied at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts for one summer and at the Art Institute of Chicago for another. She then studied art at Washington University in St. Louis for two years. She subsequently attended the Art Students League in New York City and spent a year in Europe, where she first became interested in the medium of aquatint, a form of etching. In 1932 she joined Evaline Sellors and Wade Jolley to establish the Fort Worth School of Fine Arts, where she taught figure drawing and etching. She also was manager of the Art Department of the Collins Art Company in Fort Worth. McVeigh and Sellors were founding members of the Fort Worth Artists Guild, the first local institution to display local artists. In 1942 McVeigh completed a commissioned etching for Northern Pump Company, a Minneapolis defense factory; her press at the time was not large enough for the print, so the company owner gave her a large, fine Sturges press, one of only seven made. Blanche McVeigh received awards from the Dallas Print Club, the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts, the Texas Fine Arts Association, and the Southern States Art League. Her aquatint Gwine to Heaven (1945), a small work representing her impression of the Negro spiritual, was awarded the Lila May Chapman Prize of the Southern States Art League and was reproduced in American Prize Prints of the Twentieth Century. McVeigh was a member of the Society of American Graphic Artists, the Dallas Print Club, the Fort Worth Art Association, Prairie Printmakers, the California Society of Etchers, the Printmakers Guild of Texas, and the Southern States Art League. Her work is included in many national collections, among them the Library of Congress, the Carnegie Institute, Princeton University, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Smithsonian Institution. In Texas her works can be found in the Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery in Austin, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Old Jail Art Center in Albany, the Amon Carter Museumqqv in Fort Worth, and the Fort Worth Art Association, as well as in many private collections. She died in Fort Worth on June 1, 1970.