Arthur Bairnsfather
Arthur LeRoy Bairnsfather (born April 14, 1883 in Kentucky; died April 1, 1974 in Birmingham) was a noted artist and portrait painter.
Bairnsfather was the son of John and Anna Clark Bairnsfather of Kentucky. He studied art at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he designed the badge worn by members of the Delta Zeta national sorority. He then studied under Frank Duveneck at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.
He later moved to 57 West 37th Street, between Bryant Park and Herald Square in New York City. He found work as an illustrator. He provided artwork for W. B. M. Ferguson's 1915 novel "A Man's Code" and illustrated several articles in Harper's Magazine, the People's Home Journal, McClure's, Metropolitan Magazine, and The Saturday Evening Post in the 1910s and 1920s. He married ballerina Adelaide Ranson and moved to Birmingham. Among his first commissions was a portrait of Josiah Gorgas presented to the Amelia Gayle Gorgas Library by Maria Gorgas.
Working for the Treasury Section of Fine Arts during the New Deal, Bairnsfather completed a mural "Harvesting" in the Monroeville post office and two others "Cotton Textiles" and "Historical Train Station" in the Burlington North Carolina post office. He also sat with chemist George Washington Carver for as much as 30 hours preparing studies for a pair of portrait paintings. One of those won the Blanche S. Benjamin Prize given for the "loveliest painting of a Southern subject" by the Southern States Art League in Montgomery.
Bairnsfather painted portraits of William Bell Montgomery and James Edward Evans for the Mississippi Hall of Fame's portrait gallery. He also painted a series of murals entitled "The Development of Art Consciousness" for Doster Hall at the University of Alabama. He taught students including Rosalie Pettus Price, Josephine Lawrence and Maltby Sykes. His residence was at 1038 16th Avenue South just outside the gates of Glen Iris Park.
The Bairnsfathers had two children. Their daughter, Ann, operated the Homewood School of Ballet in the Markle-Reed Building.
References
- "Art: Loveliest" (May 16, 1938) TIME magazine
- Polk's Birmingham (Jefferson County, Ala.) City Directory (1964) Richmond, Virginia: R. L. Polk & Co.