Ruth Margaret Kreps (1900-?) American, Pencil on Paper. Titled "Macdougal Alley" bottom left. Signed bottom right. Depicts an alley view in Greenwich Village circa 1940.

Frame: 18 1/2 x 14 1/8 in.

Sight: 11 x 7 1/2 in.

#2560 . 

Ruth Margaret Kreps was born in Walla Walla, Washington in 1900 to Czech immigrant John Kreps, an engraver. From an early age she showed interest in illustration, copying images from “The Owl and the Pussycat” and “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” that her mother Bessie would read to her. The family moved where there was work, spending several years in Canada before returning to the States. She attended the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco in 1918, and later the Cornish School in Seattle, where she became a part-time teacher. Her work was primarily etchings, woodblocks, and drawings of landscapes, particularly street and harbor scenes. A radical feminist, she was a founder of Women Painters of Washington, organized in 1930 to create opportunities for female artists who were often forced to sign their husband’s names to their work instead of their own. Her information is curiously missing from their records, although a picture shows her with the other six original members. She also defied racial prejudice and befriended Syvilla Fort, the first African-American student permitted to attend Cornish who became one of the most influential choreographers of her day, with at least one watercolor portrait of her by Kreps surviving. Kreps’ cartooning and etching work appeared regularly in the Seattle Town Crier up until the 1940s, when she moved to Greenwich Village in Manhattan, New York. Nothing is known of her life after, or when she passed, but her images of street scenes around the country capture timeless moments in American history from a pioneering artist’s perspective.