James E. McBurney

This biography from the archives of AskART.com.

A painter, illustrator and muralist, James McBurney was born in Lore City, Ohio. He studied in New York at the Pratt Institute and with John Twachtmann and Charles Davis, and in Philadelphia at the Drexel Institute and the Brandywine School of Art with Howard Pyle. He then went to Paris where he enrolled in the Academies Colarossi and Castelucho.

From 1901 to 1913, he was in Los Angeles where he gave private lessons and taught at a local highschool. He left to teach briefly at the A.E.F. University in Beaune, France (1919) and then went to Chicago, where he had an opportunity to paint murals. He founded an art school there, was art director for the Chicago Art District, and worked in Chicago until his death on March 2, 1955.

In Chicago, his murals are in the Palmer Park Field House, Woodlawn National Bank, Parkside School, Wentworth School, Scott School, and Tilden Technical School. Murals are also at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and the State Agricultural Expo Building in Dubuque, Iowa.

Affiliations included the California Art Club and the Cliff Dwellers in Chicago. He exhibited with the Pan-Pacific Exposition in 1915 in San Francisco.

Credit:

Edan Hughes, "Artists in California, 1786-1940"

Peter Falk, "Who Was Who in American Art"

Treadway Toomey Galleries