Beatrice Cuming

Beatrice Cuming, born and raised in Brooklyn, graduated from Pratt Institute Art School in 1923. From 1924 to 1926 she continued her study of art in Paris at the Académie Colarossi and the Académie de la Grand Chaumière and painted during trips to England and North Africa. She completed her formal training at the Art Students League in New York (1928-29) then returned to France and North Africa in 1929, painting in Paris, Marseilles, and Tunisia until 1933, when she returned to the United States. After a few months in New York, she moved to New London, Connecticut, in 1934. Throughout the 1930s she was involved with New Deal art programs, creating prints for the WPA Federal Art Project and assisting Aldis B. Browne II for a mural at the Coast Guard Academy in New London.

Cuming spent the rest of her years as an artist in New London, painting and occasionally teaching art classes from her studio or at public schools. She told a local reporter that she "found the town inexhaustible for subject matter, and in every way agreeable and good for work."(1) Her subjects of choice were New London's streets and buildings, railroad yards and docks, power plants and shipyards. Several summers spent in northern New England and the American Southwest resulted in numerous pure landscapes. She exhibited frequently-at group exhibitions in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and various Connecticut venues and in solo exhibitions at several New York galleries in the 1940s and 1950s (Guy Mayer Gallery, 1942; Contemporary Arts, 1946; New Gallery, 1952). The Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London honored her with retrospective exhibitions in 1968 and 1990.

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NOTES:

1. Quoted in Cecile S. Tyl, "Beatrice Lavis Cuming, A Biographical Sketch," in William C. Bendig, Cecile S. Tyl, and Barbara Zabel, "Beatrice Cuming: 1903-1974" (New London, Conn.: Lyman Allyn Art Museum, 1990), p. 26.