Betsy Graves Reyneau

Betsy Graves was born in 1888 in Battle Creek, Michigan and raised in Detroit. Discouraged by her father from becoming an artist on the grounds that it was inappropriate for a woman, Graves broke ties with her family to pursue that career, and as a young woman attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston where she studied under Fred Duvesack.

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.{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=oyaxYvSG6gAC|title=After the Vote Was Won: The Later Achievements of Fifteen Suffragists|last1=Adams|first1=Katherine H.|last2=Keene|first2=Michael L.|publisher=McFarland|year=2010|isbn=9780786456475|pages=57–67}}

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{{cite news|url=https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1922/12/05/98793474.html?pageNumber=19|title=BETSY G. REYNEAU EXHIBITS.|date=5 December 1922|work=The New York Times}}

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.{{cite web|url=https://miwf.org/timeline/betsy-graves-reyneau/|title=Hall of Fame Timeline: Betsy Graves Reyneau|website=Michigan Women Forward}}

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!{{cite web|url=https://nmaahc.si.edu/object/nmaahc_2011.168?destination=/explore/collection/search%3Fedan_q%3D%252A%253A%252A%26edan_fq%255B0%255D%3Dname%253A%2522Reyneau%252C%252BBetsy%252BGraves%2522|title=Keep Us Flying! Poster for war bonds depicting Tuskegee Airman Robert W. Diez|website=National Museum of African American History and Culture}}

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.

The Smithsonian connected Reyneau with the Harmon Foundation, which had been supporting African American art and artists for at least two decades. Reyneau and Foundation curator Mary Beede Brady headed the traveling exhibition that became “Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin,” sponsored by the foundation, enlisting Black artist Laura Wheeler Waring, a foundation beneficiary, to do some of the portraits and to connect Reyneau to further subjects. Reyneau and Brady saw the show as a deliberately didactic way to change the views of white Americans, with Reyneau calling it a "visual education project."{{cite news|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn_YX0QNyT8|last=Nelson|first=Steven|publisher=National Portrait Gallery (United States), the Smithsonian, via YouTube|title=Combating Racism: Betsy Graves Reyneau, Laura Wheeler Waring and Representation of Black Achievement}} As the show traveled throughout the U.S. in the 1940s, including the Brooklyn Museum, Reyneau added more paintings to the collection, so that it totaled 50 by 1954 (Waring passed away in 1948).

Though it was an "intensely popular" exhibition, African American scholar at Harvard University Steven Nelson noted that the show's call for equality was lost on both the American press and the audience. Some journalists also assumed that Reyneau was Black. The reviewer for the Black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier, however, wrote "Directors of museums that showed the paintings advanced the opinion that in some communities a noticeable lessening of racial tensions took place following the art display."

With the abolishing of legal segregation in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Harmon Foundation ended with tour.{{cite news|url=https://whyy.org/articles/historic-portraits-of-outstanding-black-americans-featured-in-new-online-exhibit/|first=Peter|last=Crimmins|title=Historic portraits of 'outstanding' Black Americans featured in new online exhibit|date=8 July 2020|publisher=WHYY-TV and PBS}} The foundation, however, did donate most of the collection to the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in 1967.{{cite news|url=https://www.si.edu/exhibitions/portraits-black-outstanding-americans-negro-origin%3Aevent-exhib-4312|title=Portraits in Black: Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin 1983|publisher=The Smithsonian}}{{Cite web|url=http://npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.67.77|title=Richmond Barthe|website=National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution|language=en|access-date=2017-08-01}}

Image:A. Philip Randolph - NARA - 559204.jpg|A. Philip Randolph

Image:Aaron Douglas - NARA - 559198.jpg|Aaron Douglas

Image:Alain Locke - NARA - 559203.jpg|Alain Locke

Image:Arna Bontemp - NARA - 559195.jpg|Arna Bontemps

Image:Charles R. Drew - NARA - 559199.jpg|Charles Drew

Image:George W Carver - NARA - 559197.jpg|George Washington Carver

Image:Marian Anderson - NARA - 559192.jpg|Marian Anderson

Image:Martin Luther King, Jr - NARA - 559202.jpg|Martin Luther King Jr.

Image:Mary Church Terrell - NARA - 559207.jpg|Mary Church Terrell

Image:Mary McLeod Bethune - NARA - 559194.jpg|Mary McLeod Bethune

Image:Paul Robeson - NARA - 559205.jpg|Paul Robeson

Image:Ralph Bunche - NARA - 559196.jpg|Ralph Bunche

Image:Richmond Barth - NARA - 559193.jpg|Richmond Barthé

Image:Ruth Temple - NARA - 559206.jpg|Ruth Temple

Image:Betsy Graves Reyneau - Thurgood Marshall - Google Art Project.jpg|Thurgood Marshall

{{Div col|colwidth=30em}}

• Hugh Mulzac
• Harry Thacker Burleigh
• William Ayers Campbell
• James Weldon Johnson
• Helen A. Whiting
• Dr. Anna Arnold Hedgeman
• May Mills
• Jane Mathilda Bolin
• Richmond Barthé

{{Div col end}}

Copies of the poster Reyneau penned in 1943 advertising war bonds are at the National Archives{{cite news|url=https://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2016/nr16-30.html?_ga=2.53609067.298792283.1652697172-922887892.1651947163|title=National Archives Museum Honors Tuskegee Airmen with Special Display|date=10 December 2015|publisher=The National Archives}} and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, both in Washington, D.C.{{cite web|url=https://nmaahc.si.edu/object/nmaahc_2011.168?destination=/explore/collection/search%3Fedan_q%3D%252A%253A%252A%26edan_fq%255B0%255D%3Dname%253A%2522Reyneau%252C%252BBetsy%252BGraves%2522|title=Keep Us Flying: Poster for war bonds depicting Tuskegee Airman Robert W. Diez|website=National Museum of African American History and Culture}} Two private portraits are also in the collection of Anthony Davenport.{{cite news|url=https://artconservator.williamstownart.org/a-tale-of-two-family-portraits|title=A TALE OF TWO PORTRAITS: THE PRESERVATION OF A PAIR OF FAMILY HEIRLOOMS |publisher=The Williamstown and Atlanta Art Conservation Center|last1=Prestowitz|first1=Brook|last2=Holland|first2=Mary}}

Seven monochrome copies of the original color canvasses from the Harmon series that Reyneau gave to the writer Pearl S. Buck because of her involvement in civil rights were shown again in an online exhibition at the Pearl S. Buck House in Bucks County, Pennsylvania in 2020.

Reyneau was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 1996.{{cite news |url=http://michiganwomen.org/Images/Reyneau,%20Betsy%20Graves.pdf |title=Michigan Women's Hall of Fame: Betsy Graves Reyneau |publisher=Michigan Women's Hall of Fame |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170328115557/http://michiganwomen.org/Images/Reyneau,%20Betsy%20Graves.pdf |archive-date=28 March 2017 |url-status=dead}}

Reyneau was married in 1915 and, a few years later, divorced. She had at least one daughter with whom she lived the last five years of her life.

• [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn_YX0QNyT8 "Combating Racism,"] YouTube lecture by Steven Nelson for the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian
• [https://whyy.org/articles/historic-portraits-of-outstanding-black-americans-featured-in-new-online-exhibit/ WHYY video article] about Pearl S. Buck House online exhibition
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20170328115557/http://michiganwomen.org/Images/Reyneau,%20Betsy%20Graves.pdf Biography] from the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame

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Category:1888 births

Category:1964 deaths

Category:American portrait painters

Category:Painters from Detroit

Category:People from Battle Creek, Michigan

Category:School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts alumni

Category:20th-century American painters

Category:20th-century American women painters