Gene Ritchie Monahan

Gene Ritchie Monahan (1908 – February 12, 1994) was an American portrait and landscape artist. She is best remembered for the character and mood she conveyed in her portraits and for the realism in her pen-and-ink drawings for the Rainy Lake Chronicle, a weekly Minnesota newspaper with an international readership.

Early life Genevieve (Gene) Ritchie was the daughter of an electrician. She graduated from Denfeld High School in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1927. She hoped to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. University student George Monahan was an early customer and married her a year and a half after she finished his portrait.

Art career

In 1955, Monahan's family moved to New York City, where she opened the Studio Gallery in Greenwich Village. She received a scholarship to study and teach at the National Academy School of Fine Arts. Although pressured by other Village artists to work in the abstract style, she refused. Her paintings were praised by Village Voice art critics for their light-filled natural tones and confident brushwork. Monahan continued her work as part of a colony of local artists. She expanded her portfolio to include silk screening and bookbinding, and experimented with sculpture and pottery using local clays. For two summers in the late 1960s, she was invited to paint and teach art to members of the Sandy Lake First Nation in Ontario.

Among those who sat for Monahan's portraits were pianist Van Cliburn, Canadian First Nations artists Norval Morrisseau and Carl Ray, Minnesota governor Rudy Perpich, conservationists Ernest Oberholtzer and Frances Andrews, and the wife of O. Meredith Wilson. Her work is held in public, corporate, and private collections worldwide. and International Falls in 2017.