E. P. Eloise Polk McGill (1868-1939)

Mrs. George A. McGill San Antonio Landscape, portrait, genre, and miniature painter, teacher. Born in Independence, McGill was reared there and on a ranch in Bandera County, then moved to San Antonio were she graduated valedictorian form Main Avenue High School. McGill studied under the miniaturist Rhoda Carleton Homes Nicholls, at the Art Students League of New York, under Frank Vincent Dumond, in Paris under Robert Reid, and under William Merritt Chase in New York; she studied landscape painting at the Cape Cod (Mass.) Art School. In San Antonio she was a student of Robert Jenkins Onderdonk. She taught in her Alamo Heights studio where she conducted the Edgar B. Davis School of Wildflower Painting. McGill died in San Antonio. She was a direct descendant of President James K. Polk and a niece of Judge Robert Emmett Bledsoe Baylor, a founder of Baylor University, a member of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Texas, and a delegate to the Texas constitutional convention of 1845. Exhibitions: San Antonio International Fair Exhibition (1888); San Antonio Art League (1894 medal); Annual Texas Artists Exhibition, fort Worth (1912, 1922-25, 1927-30, 1932-37); Annual Texas Cotton Palace Exposition, Waco (1922, 1924); Texas Artists Exhibition, San Antonio Art League (1926); San Antonio Artists Guild (1927); Edgar B. Davis Competition, San Antonio (1927-28); San Antonio Local Artists Annual Exhibition (1930-31); Pabst Gallery, San Antonio (1932 one woman); Annual Texas Artists Circuit Exhibition (1933-34); Texas Centennial Exposition, Dallas (1936); Annual Southeast Texas Artists exhibition Houston (1937); Texas Seen/Texas Made, San Antonio Museum of Art (1986); Looking at the Land: Earl Texas Painters, 1850-1950, Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, Canyon (1993); Art for History's Sake, The Texas Collection of the Witte Museum, San Antonio (1993); Images of Texas 1880-1950, Art Center, Waco (1994) Her works are in many Museums and University Collections.