Thomas C. Lea III


Thomas Calloway Lea III was an American muralist, illustrator, artist, war correspondent, novelist, and historian. The bulk of his art and literary works were about Texas, north-central Mexico, and his World War II experience in the South Pacific and Asia. Two of his most popular novels, The Brave Bulls and The Wonderful Country, are widely considered to be classics of southwestern American literature.

Early life and education

Lea was born on July 11, 1907, in El Paso, Texas, to Thomas Calloway Lea Jr. and Zola May. From 1915 to 1917, his father was mayor of El Paso. As mayor, his father made a public declaration that he would arrest Pancho Villa if he dared enter El Paso, after Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico on March 9, 1916. Villa then responded by offering a thousand pesos gold bounty on Lea. For six months Tom and his brother Joe had to have a police escort to and from school, and there was a 24-hour guard on the house.
He graduated from El Paso High School in 1924. From 1924 to 1926, he attended the Art Institute of Chicago and then apprenticed and assisted John W. Norton, a Chicago muralist, from 1927 to 1932.
In 1927, he wed Nancy June Taylor, a fellow art student. In 1930, Norton suggested that Tom take an art tour of Europe to study the masters. He and Nancy went to Paris and saw an exhibit of Eugène Delacroix at the Louvre, and Delacroix was his "favorite". Next they traveled to Florence, Orvieto, Rome, Capri. Then, after a four-month tour, it was back to Le Havre to catch the SS Ile de France.
After the tour of Italy, they moved to Santa Fe to be with other artists and be in the Southwest. When Nancy became ill, they moved to El Paso, and Lea found work from the New Deal art projects.

Career

Lea won the Section of Painting and Sculpture competition for a mural commission in the United States Post Office Department Building in Washington, D.C., called The Nesters. His other murals included those for the post offices in Odessa, Texas, Pleasant Hill, Missouri, and Seymour, Texas. In 1936, his wife, grandmother, and his mother, all died in that year.
In 1937, he started doing illustration work, and this led to a partnership with a friend of his father, author J. Frank Dobie. Dobie wrote about the rough life of settling the Texas frontier and Lea's illustrations are mostly of cowboys and the wild Texas landscapes. While painting a mural in El Paso Federal Courthouse, he met and married his second wife, Sarah Catherine Beane, in July 1938. Sarah had come from Monticello, Illinois, to El Paso to visit friends. Sarah had a son, James, from a previous marriage whom Lea adopted. While painting his courthouse mural, Lea also met artist José Cisneros and they were able to connect as friends and business contacts. That same year his started his lifelong partnership with Carl Hertzog, an El Paso book designer and typographer. 1937–1938 would prove to be the antithesis of 1936, providing Lea with three lifelong partners and friends.
In 1940, he applied for and won the Rosenwald Fellowship, but by the end of the summer of 1941, he got a telegram from LIFE asking him to go to sea with the United States Navy on a North Atlantic Patrol. In the fall of 1941, he decided to paint for LIFE as war artist and correspondent aboard a destroyer. He traveled all over the world with the United States military from 1941 to 1945. This included: China, Great Britain, Italy, India, North Africa, North Atlantic, the Middle East, and the Western Pacific. He went on deployment with the aircraft carrier USS Hornet in the Pacific Ocean in 1942, where he met the famous Army Air Corps pilot Jimmy Doolittle. Lea was on board the Hornet when the USS Wasp was sunk by torpedoes from a Japanese submarine. He painted several pictures of the sinking of the Wasp. In 1943, during his visit to China, he met Theodore H. White, and he painted the portraits of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, Soong Mei-ling; and General Claire Lee Chennault, leader of the Flying Tigers.
Some of Lea's most impactful work came during his time as a combat correspondent with the United States 1st Marine Division at the Battle of Peleliu. The battle, which saw the Marines suffer heavy losses amidst fierce Japanese resistance, became the subject of controversy due to the questionable strategic value of the island.
Lea described his time there as "…trying to keep from getting killed and trying to memorize what I saw and felt." His vivid depiction of the beach landing and subsequent battle across the island included two of his most famous works, The Price and The Two-Thousand Yard Stare, both of which spotlight the human toll of the battle.
In 1947, Lea finished a graphite sketch on kraft paper of his wife called Study for Sarah in the Summertime. He had started the sketch two years earlier, about six months after he got home from the war. The life size work was based on a photograph, taken of Sarah in the backyard of their home at 1520 Raynolds Boulevard in El Paso, that he had carried in his wallet throughout the war. An oil painting, Sarah in the Summertime, was then done from the sketch. He spent longer on this combined work than any other painting.
After finishing his last novel, The Hands of Cantu in 1964, Lea traveled to Boston to meet with his publishers, Little, Brown and Company. He told them that he wasn't interested in another novel, so they suggested a book about his pictures. This 1968 work, A Picture Gallery, was his "autobiography", writing of why and when he did his paintings. Working on A Picture Gallery would lead him to once again focus on painting and turn away from working on literature. Right before finishing this work, Baylor University paid tribute to his writing by bestowing him, and his long-time friend Carl Hertzog, with an honorary doctorate's in literature. The El Paso Museum of Art established its Tom Lea Gallery in 1996, and in 1997 he was honored as a Fellow in the Texas State Historical Association. President George W. Bush had Lea's painting Rio Grande displayed in the Oval Office.
Lea died in El Paso on January 29, 2001, at the age of 93.

Awards

Lifetime achievement

Literature

Art works

Public murals

State of Texas Centennial Commission, Federal Art Project for the Works Progress Administration and Public Works of Art Project for the United States Department of the Treasury.

Paintings

Two-Thousand-Yard Stare, – United States Army Center of Military History, Fort Lesley J. McNair, Washington, D.C., – 1944, oil on canvasRio Grande, – Oval Office – White House, Washington D.C., – 1954, oil on canvasSouthwest, Study for, – American Art Museum, Smithsonian, Washington, D.C., – 1956. Oil on canvas, 10 × 32 in.

Major exhibitions

Permanent collections

Works by

Illustrative works

  • 1939: Dobie, J. Frank. – Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver. – Boston: Little, Brown and Company. –
  • 1941: Dobie, J. Frank. – The Longhorns. – Boston: Little, Brown and Company. –
  • 1946: Calendar of Twelve Travelers through the Pass of the North. – El Paso: Carl Hertzog. –

Non-fiction works with illustrations

  • 1945: Peleliu Landing. – El Paso: Carl Hertzog. –
  • 1949: Bullfight Manual for Spectators. – Ciudad Juárez, Mexico: Plaza de Toros. –
  • 1957: The King Ranch. – with Richard King. – Boston: Little, Brown and Company. –
  • 1968: Tom Lea, A Picture Gallery: Paintings and Drawings. – Boston: Little, Brown and Company. –
  • 1974: In the Crucible of the Sun. – Kingsville, Texas: King Ranch. –
  • 1998: Battle Stations: A Grizzly from the Coral Sea, Peleliu Landing. – Dallas: Still Point Press. –

Fiction works with illustrations

  • 1949: The Brave Bulls, A Novel. – Boston: Little, Brown and Company. –
  • 1952: The Wonderful Country, A Novel. – Boston: Little, Brown and Company. –
  • 1960: The Primal Yoke, A Novel. – Boston: Little, Brown and Company. –
  • 1964: The Hands of Cantú. – Boston: Little, Brown and Company. –

Works about

  • Lea, Tom, and the Fort Worth Art Center,. – Tom Lea. – Fort Worth, Texas: Fort Worth Art Center. –
  • Lea, Tom, Rebecca McDowell Craver and Adair Margo,. – Tom Lea: An Oral History. – El Paso, Texas: Texas Western Press. –
  • Lea, Tom, and Kathleen G Hjerter,. – The Art of Tom Lea. – College Station, Texas: Texas A & M University Press. –
  • Lea, Tom, and Brendan M Greeley,. – The Two Thousand Yard Stare: Tom Lea's World War II. – College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press. –