Lucretia Van Horn

Who was Lucretia Van Horn?

Lucretia Blow Le Bourgeois Van Horn was a noted American artist. When she was eighteen, she enrolled in the Art Students League of New York where she took classes from John Twachtman and George Bridgman. She then traveled to Paris in 1902 to continue her studies at the Académie Julian where she was the first woman to be awarded the Concours Julian-Smith in 1904.

On her return to the United States, she began to earn commissions mainly for her meticulous illustrations in magazines and books, like those she drew for Helen Hay Whitney's book of poems, entitled Herbs and Apples. In San Antonio, Texas, she helped form the San Antonio Conversation Society in 1924. In 1926 she met Diego Rivera. As Rivera was finishing his mural project at the Ministry of Education in Mexico City, Mrs. Van Horn joined him and other artists in the production of the work. Rivera painted her face in one of the murals on the third floor of the building.

For four years, she and her husband lived in Berkeley, California where she joined various art leagues and worked with prominent artists in the Bay Area, including John Emmett Gerrity, David Park and Galka Scheyer who represented The Blue Four: European abstractionists, Feininger, Kandinsky, Jawlensky and Klee. She also became a member of the San Francisco Art Association and the Society of Women Artist, won several notable awards, and was included in a major international retrospective at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco as one of thirty-five American artists.