Virginia True (1900 – 1989)

The Ditch, 1934, oil on board, signed and dated lower right, 18 x 24 inches, label verso has title, artist’s name, Colorado and New York addresses, and original price

$4250

Virginia True painted The Ditch during a key moment in her development as a Colorado Regionalist painter. She had moved to Colorado in 1929 to teach at the University of Colorado at Boulder and associated with a group of four other like-minded artists who dubbed themselves The Prospectors. Their goal was to paint local scenes of the Mountain and Desert West and in so doing capture the “spirit of a place.” The Ditch is typical of True’s contributions to The Prospectors’ efforts. She fell in love with the West and for the first half of the 1930s, she became one of the core chroniclers of Colorado, New Mexico and the surrounding states. Writing of her experiences in New Mexico, True proclaimed, “Longing unallayed! And pray, what is that? I am like an erect tent whose sides flap in the breeze for want of an anchor. Such queer thoughts and feelings struggling for expression. They cannot always be suppressed. Some day they will find utterance. Might I preserve on canvas my thrill and deep feeling of the grand things of nature I have beheld today. ‘There is a wideness in God's mercy, like the wideness of the Sea.’ There's a wideness in God's country that expresses peace to me.” In 1934, the same year that True painted The Ditch, The Prospectors mounted a show of their Regionalist paintings that traveled to Arizona, Nebraska and other Western and Midwestern states. The exhibition followed closely on True’s solo exhibition at the Denver Museum of Art in November 1933, and anticipated True’s first prize award in 1935 at the Mid-Western Artists Exhibition at the Kansas City Art Institute for the painting The Woodchopper, which was widely published across the United States.  

Born in St. Louis, True was initially educated in Indianapolis at the John Herron Art Institute with William Forsyth. Facing financial difficulty due to her father’s death, True also taught at Herron and did illustration and fashion design to support herself. True later studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and after her time in Colorado, she moved to Ithaca New York to teach and study painting with Christian Midjo at Cornell University. True also studied as part of Columbia’s summer program and with Daniel Garber and Hugh Breckinridge, as well as in Rome. While studying at Cornell, True was commissioned to complete a mural concerning home economics for Martha Van Rensselaer Hall. Although she had hoped to return to the West, no positions were available at the University of Colorado, so True elected to stay at Cornell where she was the head of the Department of Housing and Design for many years until 1965. During her long career, True was a member of the National Association of Women Artists, Cornell’s White Museum Art Association, and Provincetown Art Association. She exhibited often with her member organizations, and at the Denver Art Museum, where she was awarded a prize in 1932, Kansas City Art Institute, and Rochester Memorial Art Gallery. The White Museum at Cornell honored True with a retrospective when she retired in 1965. She is extensively listed in Who Was Who in American Art and other standard references.