Frances Foy (1890–1963)
Frances Foy, from a photograph in Chicago Sunday Tribune, Aug. 8, 1948.
Associated with Chicago’s community of progressive artists early in her career, Frances Foy was a commercially successful illustrator, painter, and printmaker whose works include portraits, still lifes, and scenes of everyday life. Foy was born in Chicago and raised in suburban Oak Park. At school, she demonstrated a talent for drawing, and she spent a summer at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts studying with portraitist Wellington Reynolds. Foy began working as a fashion illustrator before enrolling in evening classes at the Art Institute of Chicago’s school, where she again worked under Reynolds. She was influenced by visiting instructors George Bellows and Randall Davey, who inspired a generation of young “rebels” among Chicago’s artists. Among them was painter Gustaf Dalstrom, whom Foy married in 1923.
Foy began exhibiting her paintings as early as 1922, when her work first appeared in the No-Jury Society of Artists exhibitions, an alternative to the Art Institute’s annual shows. By 1926, the Art Institute was displaying her canvases as well. Foy and Dalstrom exhibited with the so-called Fifty-seventh Street art colony, and both were elected directors of the No-Jury Society. Foy’s work was featured in solo exhibitions sponsored by Chicago Woman’s Aid in 1927 and at the Romany Club the next year. Also in 1928, she and her husband traveled throughout Europe. Foy received a gold medal from the Chicago Society of Artists in 1929, the year she was given a small solo exhibition at the Art Institute. She received several awards in the museum’s annual exhibitions during the early 1930s. J. Z. Jacobson included her in his 1932 book Art of Today: Chicago 1933, a compendium of Chicago’s modernist artists.
In the 1930s Foy painted several post office murals under the auspices of the U.S. Treasury Department’s New Deal relief programs, and she served on the technical committee of the federal Public Works of Art Project. Floral still-lifes dominated Foy’s mature work as a painter in oils and watercolors. Alongside her husband in the studios of Hull House, Foy also learned to make etchings. In the 1930s the couple collaboratively illustrated an anatomy book. Their paintings of the Lincoln Park neighborhood, where they lived for many years, were featured in a joint exhibition at the Chicago Historical Society in 1948. Foy’s papers are preserved along with Dalstrom’s in the collection of the Archives of American Art.
Frances Foy, Portrait of a Girl, dated 1941
Oil on canvas, 24 by 20 inches
Portraits of children were a staple of Frances Foy’s artistic practice. In this example, she captured a little girl patiently posing in her formal best on a blue upholstered sofa. Complementing the tones of her pink-and-white checked jumper are several bright blossoms in a cut-glass bowl on a round table positioned between the figure and the viewer. Resting one hand on an open book, the sitter gazes off to the left as if she has just looked up from reading. Typical of Foy’s oil-painting style are the delicate muted colors and the allover patterned brushwork that lends a subtle vibration to surfaces. The diagonal curves etched into the glass bowl at the lower right echo the graceful line of the sofa back against the neutral backdrop, while the rectilinear form of the book is repeated in the square buttons and checked pattern of the girl’s dress.
At the midpoint in her career, Foy was identified as an artist “who paints flowers, children and still life with delicate feeling and a pale, elusive color scheme.”[i] This work combines her characteristic subjects in what is most likely a commissioned portrait, as indicated by its solid realism and the formality of the little girl’s studied pose and Sunday-best attire. In the 1920s, Foy emerged as one of Chicago’s modernists with paintings that use expressive distortion of line and shape in images of everyday objects and scenes. This work, however, indicates her adaptability to more traditional standards of representation in a detailed and perhaps flattering portrayal of a specific individual. By the 1940s, Foy cultivated the favor of a mainstream public, regularly sending works on consignment to the art gallery at Marshall Field’s department store, for example.
[i] Daniel Catton Rich, “Chicago Painters,” American Magazine of Art 24 (Feb. 1932): 113.