Grace Albee

Who was Grace Albee?

Grace Thurston Arnold Albee was an American printmaker and wood engraver. During her sixty-year working life, she created more than two hundred and fifty prints from linocuts, woodcuts, and wood engravings.

Grace was born in Rhode Island. She studied painting and drawing at the Rhode Island School of Design, and married muralist Percy F. Albee in 1913. She resumed painting while living in Paris with her husband and five sons between World War I and World War II, where she associated with fellow expatriate artists including Norman Rockwell and engraver Paul Bornet. The Albees returned to the United States in the 1933 and lived in New York City and Grace produced prints of the city. In 1937, they moved to Doylestown, Pennsylvania and her prints switched to rural subjects. The images of rural life that she produced while lived in Pennsylvania are probably her best known works. The Albees lived in Pennsylvania until 1962 after which they lived in Kew Gardens, New York and then in Barrington, Rhode Island.

Albee works are represented in a number of public collections in the United States, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 1976, eighty of her works were displayed in a retrospective exhibition in the Brooklyn Museum. The Library of Congress has 23 of her prints in its collection. Her works are also housed the Smithsonian Institution, in the Rosenwald Collection in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in the Permanent Collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Boston Public Library.