Born the second child to a traveling salesman and a woman of modest means in a small community in Kansas, Thelma aspired to be more. After the family's move to St. Louis, Missouri where her father established a chemical extract business, and losing her mother Maud and younger brother Richard to the influenza epidemic of 1918, she decided to study overseas and found herself part of the expatriate artist community in Paris, France. There she explored her talent as a painter and sculptress but with the urging of friends and lovers, Edna St.Vincent Millay, Berenice Abbott and Djuna Barnes, created many silverpoint works now housed in the University of Maryland and private collections. After returning to New York City in 1929 where she later showed her works in the Milch gallery, she settled in Connecticut with first Henriette McCrea Metcalf and later Margaret Behrens. Thelma never received recognition in her own right as an artist, only in the context of ex lovers and died of metastasized breast cancer.
Born the second child to a traveling salesman and a woman of modest means in a small community in Kansas, Thelma aspired to be more. After the family's move to St. Louis, Missouri where her father established a chemical extract business, and losing her mother Maud and younger brother Richard to the influenza epidemic of 1918, she decided to study overseas and found herself part of the expatriate artist community in Paris, France. There she explored her talent as a painter and sculptress but with the urging of friends and lovers, Edna St.Vincent Millay, Berenice Abbott and Djuna Barnes, created many silverpoint works now housed in the University of Maryland and private collections. After returning to New York City in 1929 where she later showed her works in the Milch gallery, she settled in Connecticut with first Henriette McCrea Metcalf and later Margaret Behrens. Thelma never received recognition in her own right as an artist, only in the context of ex lovers and died of metastasized breast cancer.
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