Jean McLane

Jean McLane (1878-1964) was one of the most accomplished American portrait painters of the early twentieth century, celebrated for her elegant and psychologically penetrating portraits of women and children. Born in Chicago, she pursued her artistic training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before continuing her studies at the Art Students League in New York, where she worked under William Merritt Chase, Frank Vincent DuMond, and Kenyon Cox. This distinguished training placed her within the mainstream of American academic and Impressionist practice at its most sophisticated moment, and gave her the technical range that would define her mature portrait work.

McLane married the Danish-American painter John C. Johansen in 1905, and the two established a shared artistic practice that would carry them across the United States and Europe for the remainder of their long careers. Together they lived and worked in Chicago, New York, and abroad, and their combined studio became one of the important centers of American portrait painting during the first half of the twentieth century.

McLane became known for her portraits of prominent American and European women and their children, capturing sitters with unusual sensitivity to character, dress, and setting. Her most celebrated commissions included portraits of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Lady Nancy Astor, and Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, whom she painted during the First World War as part of a series of portraits documenting the Belgian royal family and the leaders of the Allied nations. This work brought her international recognition and helped establish her as one of the leading portraitists of her generation. She received the French Legion of Honor in recognition of her contributions.

McLane was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1912 and a full Academician in 1920, one of the highest recognitions available to an American painter of her era. Her paintings are held today in significant American museum collections and continue to be appreciated as some of the most refined portraits produced by an American woman painter during the early twentieth century.