Betsy Graves Reyneau

Betsy Graves Reyneau was an American painter, best known for a series of paintings of prominent African Americans for the exhibition "Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin" that, with those by Laura Wheeler Waring and under the Harmon Foundation, toured the United States from 1944 to 1954. A granddaughter of Michigan Supreme Court Justice Benjamin F. Graves, Reyneau's sitters included Mary McLeod Bethune, George Washington Carver, Joe Louis, and Thurgood Marshall. Reyneau's portrait of Carver, the most famous, was the first of an African American to enter a national American collection.

Most of the contributions to the "Portraits of Outstanding Americans" are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C.

Reyneau was a suffragette; she became, in 1917, one of the first women to be arrested and imprisoned for protesting Woodrow Wilson's stance on women's voting rights.

She was later selected by the Circuit Court of Detroit, unbeknownst to her family who were not in touch with her at the time, to paint a portrait of her grandfather, Michigan Supreme Court Justice Benjamin F. Graves. She initialed the portrait and did not sign it with her full name as the Michigan Artists with whom she first exhibited it, would not allow the work of women. Her father, who presented the portrait, was also unaware that it was painted by his daughter

Reyneau's first solo exhibition in New York City was in 1922, on the Upper West Side, where she showed this portrait among others and received coverage in the New York Times. She also lived in Boston and Washington D.C.

Reyneau lived in Europe with her daughter from 1926 to 1939, where they took in Jews suffering persecution under the Nazis.

During the last years of World War II, she was commissioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury to design a poster to sell war bonds. She depicted with ink on paper, Tuskegee Airman Robert W. Diez with the words Keep Up Flying!

When she returned to the United States, Reyneau was horrified by the treatment of African Americans, finding it akin to German fascism. She moved South and became active in civil rights causes. Her first portrait of a Black subject was of a young garden worker, Edward Lee, in 1942. That same year she went to the Tuskegee Institute to look for pilots to paint as subjects. Not finding any, she encountered George Washington Carver there who became her first and most famous subject. Her portrait of him in 1944 entered collection of the Smithsonian Institution, the first of a Black man in a national American collection.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2024