Sarah Blakeslee

Sarah Jane Blakeslee (January 13, 1912 – January 12, 2005) was an American landscape and portrait painter.

Education Born in Evanston, Illinois, Blakeslee studied as a teenager at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Corcoran School of Art. She also took lessons at the private school in Washington, D.C. run by Catharine Carter Critcher, who encouraged her to enroll in the Chester Springs branch of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts once she had graduated from high school. While there, she received two Cresson Traveling Scholarships.

Family life Among Blakeslee's instructors at the academy was Francis Speight, whom she married on November 7, 1936, shortly after graduating. In 1961, Speight took a position as artist in residence at East Carolina University (then East Carolina College), and the couple moved south. Blakeslee continued teaching and painting in her new home, continuing following her husband's death in 1989. She rented out rooms to international students until 1998, when she retired and returned to Pennsylvania to be near her daughter.

Exhibits She was a regular exhibitor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1938 until 1964, Among the institutions which hold examples of her work are the North Carolina Museum of Art; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; the Greenville Museum of Art in North Carolina, which dedicated a gallery to her work and that of her husband in 2002; the Muskegon Museum of Art; and the Cameron Art Museum.

Awards Blakeslee received numerous awards during her career, including the Mary Smith prize of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in 1940; the Ranger Fund purchase prize of the National Academy of Design; first prize at the Woodmere Gallery in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, in 1952; and first prize and a gold medal from the National Exhibition in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, in 1961. In 1994 she received a North Carolina Award for her work. In 1996, her artwork was featured, along with 44 other artists, in an exhibit in Yellow Springs, Pennsylvania of attendees of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Art critic Victoria Donohoe praised the quality of her work.