Featured in the exhibition Texas Women Artists: Selections from Bywaters Special Collections, on the 2nd floor of Hamon Arts Library.
Blanche McVeigh was born in St. Charles, Missouri in 1895 and moved to Fort Worth as a child. She received her art training at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Art Students League in New York. McVeigh spent a year in Europe where she became interested in the medium of aquatint, a printmaking technique related to engraving and etching that allows an artist to create variations of shading within the print image.
McVeigh spent her adult life in Fort Worth where she taught figure drawing and printmaking. In 1932 she joined Evaline Sellors and Wade Jolley, both professional artists, in establishing the Fort Worth School of Fine Arts in the Little Theatre building behind the Women’s Club. McVeigh and Sellors also helped found the Fort Worth Artists Guild, the first institution to display work by local artists. McVeigh was also a member of the Printmakers Guild and in 1951 was elected to serve as the organization’s president.
McVeigh received awards for her work from the Dallas Print Club, the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts, the Texas Fine Arts Association, and the Southern States Art League. In 1944 her aquatint Decatur Courthouse was awarded the Neiman-Marcus and Dallas Print Society Purchase Prize of $100 in the Fourth Annual Texas Print Exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. The Library of Congress also purchased Decatur Courthouse for its permanent collection. Her work is located in other national collections: Carnegie Institute, Princeton University, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and Smithsonian Institution.
Blanche McVeigh died in Fort Worth on June 1, 1970.
[1] Farmer, David. “The Printmakers Guild and Women Printmakers in Texas 1939 – 1965,” Prints and Printmakers of Texas: Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual North American Print Conference, (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1997), p. 124.
[1] Handbook of Texas Online, Linda Peterson, “McVeigh, Blanche,” accessed July 27, 2017, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fmcbf
Image: Blanche McVeigh, ca. early 1920s, original dimensions: 8” (H) x 5” (W)
Courtesy of The Jerry Bywaters Collection on Art of the Southwest, Bywaters Special Collections, Hamon Arts Library, Southern Methodist University