Grace McArthur

Grace McArthur (1899–1986) was a Michigan-based folk artist known for the top-to-bottom oil paintings she created later in life.

Biography Grace Helen Bell was born to Nellie Larges and Wilhelm Bell in Detroit, Michigan, on March 15, 1898. Grace married then-medical student Stewart Coyles McArthur in 1916 in Detroit. The pair lived there just long enough to have two children, before moving north to the Mount Pleasant area in the village of Rosebush.

Little is known about her life from this point until she began painting at the age of 50. Grace McArthur created hundreds of folk oil paintings in Michigan between 1948 and 1973. She never painted the same scene twice, and would always refuse if a customer requested an identical copy of one of her previous paintings. She eventually retired from art around 1973, when she was 75. One of her final paintings was a collection of everyone who had been important to her life, painted on an extra large canvas titled that she titled My World.

Her sense of humor is often seen in her work, as she painted dogs running away from their owners or truck drivers operating their steering wheels from the wrong side of their vehicles. One of her paintings featured a man slipping on a banana peel while an onlooking woman dramatically covers her ears, presumably in an attempt to drown out the foul language coming from the mouth of the banana peel's victim. The author of a book written for the sesquicentennial of the hotel described the painting in 1986 as follows:

The painting hung above the fireplace in the Botsford Inn for several decades before it sold in a private auction in the early 2000s. Another painting is hanging in the Doherty Hotel, at the top of the stairs of the lobby area, in Clare, Michigan. The painting is of the hotel and Clare, area downtown. Also, just recently, as of March of 2026, a donation of her painting, "Memories of my Childhood in Detroit" was donated to the MSU Gallery. It is now in residing in their permanent collection for the public to see when they show it. This painting depicts a typical day of downtown area that she remembers from the early 1900's. With wagons, horses, a Model-T Ford, small houses and business, people milling about and shopping in various stores. This painting is full of humor and life, as is most usually found in her paintings. The donation was made by her granddaughter who owned the painting for 64 years, as it was originally a gift to Grace's daughter, Doris Vivian, in 1960.

Notability A winter scene painted by McArthur titled Christmas in the Country served as the cover of the December 1972 edition of Ford Motor Company's publication, Ford Times.

Several of Grace McArthur's works were featured in a 2018 episode of America's Antiques Roadshow. Filmed at Meadow Brook Hall in Rochester, Michigan, the episode included a $2,000 valuation for six original oil paintings by McArthur.