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E. George de Ville

1888 Appleton, Wisconsin - 1960 St. John's, Arizona

BiographyGeorge de Ville was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, to Belgian parents. He studied at the Layton Art Academy in Milwaukee and briefly under the tutelage of Charles M. Russell in Montana. In the early 1920s, he created lithographs for theater lobbies, and made movie displays for Jesse Lasky Studios in Hollywood. By the mid-1920s, de Ville and his wife Mae and two young daughters were traveling from town to town in California and Nevada, painting signs and murals, redecorating movie theaters, and doing interior decorating for private residences while selling their oil paintings. In 1932 their car broke down in Gallup, New Mexico, where they supported themselves by making 'food special' banners for grocery stores. By the mid-1930s, he was encouraged to try sand painting. One of his early efforts, a replica of the old railway station in Gallup, was purchased by the ATSF Railway and later used as the cover artwork for their 1944 calendar. He exhibited alongside O.E. Berninghaus, E. Martin Hennings, Joseph Imhof, and others at the Gallup Federal Art Center. In the late 1930s, Eleanor Roosevelt commissioned George to do a portrait of FDR, which hung in the White House. In 1939, Paramount Pictures featured the couple in a short film that shows them working in the lobby of the El Rancho Hotel in Gallup. De Ville set up a studio in a small Mormon settlement near Springerville, AZ, before moving to Concho, AZ, in 1947. Between 1950 and 1960, George had several exhibitions in Texas and New Mexico, including landscapes, portraits, romanticized scenes of Navajo daily life, mountain scenes, and religious scenes. [https://www.matteucci.com/george-de-ville]

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