Doris Lee

Doris Emrick Lee (1905-1983) was among the most visible and commercially successful American women artists of the Depression era, known for warm, deliberately unsophisticated scenes of rural and domestic life that helped define the American Scene movement. Born in Aledo, a small farming town in western Illinois, she graduated from Rockford College in 1927 with a degree in art and philosophy, then studied painting in Italy and France during a year abroad with her first husband, the photographer Russell Lee. Returning to the United States, she trained under the American Impressionist Ernest Lawson at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1929 and, the following year, at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco under Arnold Blanch, who would become her second husband. By the early 1930s she had settled in Woodstock, New York, where she became a leading figure in the artists' colony and remained for much of her career. Her work appeared in the Whitney Museum's Biennial in 1932.

National recognition came in 1935, when her bustling kitchen scene Thanksgiving won the Logan Prize at the Art Institute of Chicago. The award provoked a public controversy: Josephine Logan, the prize's donor, condemned the painting's broad, faux-naive handling and founded the conservative Sanity in Art movement in response. The furor only expanded Lee's audience, and the image became one of the most widely reproduced American holiday pictures of the century. Treasury Department mural commissions followed, along with lithographs for Associated American Artists, illustrations for Life, and work in textile and ceramic design.