Tom Lea

The following video is an interview with Tom Lea at his home in El Paso, Texas on December 1st, 1998.

The interview was done by Kathy Flynn, who is the Executive Director of the National New Deal Preservation Association and the New Mexico Chapter of the NNDPA.

Thomas Calloway Lea, III (1907-2001) was a muralist, author, illustrator and fine artist known for his Texas landscapes and for his work as a war-time artist and correspondent.

Tom Lea was born in El Paso, Texas to a prominent local family. His father, an attorney, was mayor of El Paso from 1915 to 1917, during the Mexican Revolution. After Pancho Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico in 1916, Mayor Lea vowed to arrest Villa if he tried to enter El Paso. Villa responded with a 1000 peso gold bounty on the Mayor. As a result, the Lea house was under 24-hour guard and young Tom and his brother, Joe, had a police escort to and from school for six months.

Lea attended El Paso schools, graduating in 1924. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1924 to 1926 and then apprenticed with Chicago muralist John W. Norton. Norton suggested that Lea make a tour of Europe to study the masters so in 1930 Tom and his wife of three years, Nancy June, sailed for Paris and then spent four months touring Italy before returning to the U.S. aboard the Ile de France.

In 1933, Lea decided to return to the Southwest, and he and Nancy settled in Santa Fe where they could enjoy the camaraderie of other artists. Lea joined the staff of the Laboratory of Anthropology (then a private research organization and now a unit of the Museum of New Mexico) where he did his first book illustration project, H.P. Mera's, The "Rain Bird;" A Study in Pueblo Design (1937). He also did illustration work for Santa Fe Magazine along with any other jobs that would help him scrape together a living during the depths of the Depression. The Lea's time in Santa Fe was cut short when Nancy endured a botched appendectomy in 1936, and the couple moved to be with family in El Paso. Nancy died shortly thereafter.

Lea won his first mural commission (independent of John Norton) in 1935, for paintings honoring the Texas Centennial Celebration at the Texas State Fairgrounds. The same year he started a mural for the Branigan Memorial Library in Las Cruces, New Mexico. These were followed by U.S. Post Office murals for government buildings, commissioned by the Treasury Department's Section of Fine Arts. They included: the U.S. Post Office Department Building in Washington, D.C.; Federal Courthouse, El Paso, Texas (1938); U.S. Post Office, Pleasant Hill, Missouri (1939); U.S. Post Office, Odessa, Texas (1940); and U.S. Post Office, Seymour, Texas (1942). In 1956, Lea donated a mural to the El Paso Public Library.

While painting the El Paso Courthouse mural, Lea met Sara Dighton Beane who was visiting from Illinois. They were married in 1938. Sara had one son, James, who Lea adopted.

Lea began his second book project in 1937 illustrating cowboy life and the Southwestern landscape for J. Frank Dobie's Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver (1939) followed by Dobie's The Longhorns (1940). While working on the former volume, Lea met the El Paso book designer and typographer Carl Hertzog, and they began a life-long friendship and collaboration. In their first project together, Lea illustrated a book of square-dance calls, Honor Your Pardner (1940), that Hertzog was publishing. By that time, however, Lea had turned his attention to writing as well as illustrating his own books. In 1941 they published Lea's Randado, the story of an 18th century Texas ranch.

For the rest of this Biography on Tom Lea visit this site. Medicine Man Gallery

The Tom Lea Institute has his bio and other interesting information.