13 Facts About Doris Lee

Doris Emrick Lee was an American painter known for her figurative painting and printmaking.

Doris Lee won the Logan Medal of the Arts from the Chicago Art Institute in 1935.

Doris Lee is known as one of the most successful female artists of the Depression era in the United States.

Doris Lee graduated from Rockford College in 1927 and studied with the American Impressionist and Ashcan School painter Ernest Lawson at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1929.

Doris Lee attended the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco in 1930.

In 1937, Doris Lee painted two murals in the Main Post Office in Washington, DC, and another in the Summerville, Georgia, Post Office.

Doris Lee's 1935 painting "Noon", was referenced in Vladimir Nabokov's book Lolita.

Doris Lee taught at Michigan State University and was invited to attend Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center as a guest artist.

In 1935, Doris Lee's bustling scene of women preparing a Thanksgiving feast became the object of national headlines when it was first exhibited at the Chicago Art Institute and won the prestigious Logan Medal of the Arts.

The themes of Thanksgiving, rural customs, and family life, which Doris Lee painted in a deliberately folksy manner, would have had great appeal to a country still in the midst of the national devastation of the Great Depression.

Doris Lee's painting offered a quaint model of domesticity that appealed to those who were tired of the complication of modern life in the 1930s.

Doris Lee's work received public and critical acclaim for its earthy qualities and sense of humor.

Doris Lee was awarded the Logan Medal of the Arts at the 46th American Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago.