Louise Thoron MacVeagh

Louise Thoron MacVeagh (1898-1987) was an American painter and illustrator who studied with Leon Bakst and was known for her painted murals.

Education and Career

Louise Warder Thoron was born in 1898 in Lenox Massachusetts, the home of her father’s mother’s family, the Wards. Her parents were Ellen Nancy Warder (1871-1959) and Ward Thoron (whose full name was Marie-Joseph Paul Louis François Firement Samuel Ward Thoron) (1867-1938). She attended Westover School, Colorado College (1916–1919), Cooper Union (1919) and the Art Students League (1919–1923; 1925). In 1922 she studied under Leon Bakst, the Ballets Russes set designer and artist, helping him, at the invitation of her aunt Alice Warder Garrett, decorate rooms, including a Modernist private theatre, at Evergreen House, her home in Baltimore. Bakst then invited Louise to Paris to assist him in the painting of the ceiling of the Opera. She declined, and in 1923 she was married. Throughout her career, Louise made paintings, murals paintings, embroidered tablecloths, and illustrated books.

Book illustrations

Louise provided illustrations for the Great Fables by Manuel Komroff, (Dial Press, New York, 1928), reprinted in 1936, and "How you Began" by Amabel Williams-Ellis (Coward, McCann, Inc. 1929).

Murals

Sometime after 1927 Louise painted a mural on West 85th street in New York at the Three Arts Club, a residence for women studying music, painting and drama. In around 1931, probably through the new Headmaster, Reverend Edric Amory Weld, the Holderness School near Plymouth, NH, commissioned Louise to paint eight murals. These murals depict winter sports and the terrain of the nearby White Mountain National Forest. In 1956 Louise was chosen to paint a mural of a riverbed with its flora and fauna, wading birds and horses, for a niche over the swimming pool at the Colony Club on 62nd street and Park Avenue.

Art Appreciation

Louise was raised in a family who appreciated and supported the arts. Her mother grew up in the Warder Mansion designed by H. H. Richardson, whose stone doorway went to the Smithsonian. On her father's side, she can trace her relatives back to the Thorons of Carcasonne, including Pierre Antoine THORON (1708-1773), Mayor of Carcassonne. Her paternal great-great-grandfather William Ward commissioned a large version of Hiram Powers's sculpture The Greek Slave, now at the National Gallery; and her grandfather, Samuel Gray Ward, who was a founder of the Metropolitan Museum, commissioned a 24-inch replica of it, which went to the Corcoran Gallery. Additionally, Louise's paternal aunt and namesake, Marie Louise Thoron (1864-1958), "Loulou" (Mrs. William Crowninshield Endicott Jr.) and her aunt's mother-in-law, Ellen Peabody Endicott (1833–1927), were painted by John Singer Sargent (in 1903 and 1901). In addition to being an artist all her life, Louise served as Art Editor of the Junior League Magazine from 1931-1937. In 1933 she covered the Michael Friedsam collection at the Metropolitan Museum, the Worcester Museum and the International 1933 (CAA). In 1939 served on the women's committee for a benefit for the building fund of the new Church of the Epiphany (Episcopal, Manhattan) helping to organize a performance by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo at the Metropolitan Opera

Marriage and children

In 1923 Louise married Ewen Cameron MacVeagh (1895–1971), son of Charles MacVeagh in the Bethlehem Chapel of Washington Cathedral. They spent their summers in Dublin, New Hampshire, where they lived at Fasnacloich built by Ewen's father. There, Louise was permitted by her mother-in-law to paint in the old cider house which became her studio. She and Ewen had three daughters and seven grandchildren.

Louise was a member of the National Association of Women Artists and is listed in Who's Who in American Art of 1931. She did not, as a rule, sign her paintings.