Betsy Graves Reyneau

Betsy Graves Reyneau (1888–1964 ) 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.

Early life and education 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.

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.

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 Us Flying!

When she returned to the United States, Reyneau was horrified by the treatment of African Americans, finding it akin to German fascism. 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 The foundation, however, did donate most of the collection to the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in 1967.

Gallery

Other Reyneau portrait subjects in the collection

Hugh Mulzac and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, both in Washington, D.C. Two private portraits are also in the collection of Anthony Davenport.

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.

Personal life 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.