Dorothy Holloway Pflager

Dorothy Pflager was a painter active in St. Louis in the mid-twentieth century. Originally from Los Angeles, Pflager first received a bachelor's of art from Wellesley College before attending Washington University in St. Louis. Unlike many of her St. Louis contemporaries, Pflager did not attend the St. Louis School of Fine Arts, and instead completed her master’s degree in English.

Pflager’s active career began in 1940, when she began participating in St. Louis Artists’ Guild exhibitions. Working primarily in watercolor, Pflager's paintings most frequently depicted St. Louis scenes and streetscapes in bright, sunny atmospheres, with colorful titles such as, Spring is PINK!, or PIKE COUNTY WEEK-END Mood? Gay! Pflager’s playful humor also translated into titles that cleverly adopted the spelling of her name, such as Pflowers by Pflager and Winter at the Pfarm.

Perhaps Pflager’s most significant series of works were her watercolor portraits of houses in the Mill Creek Valley neighborhood of St. Louis. A historic African-American community, the Mill Creek Valley was once home to many prominent Black St. Louis figures such as Scott Joplin and Josephine Baker. When the area was threatened with demolition in the 1950s owing largely to government-funded urban renewal initiatives, Pflager began memorializing the historic homes of the neighborhood before the majority of them were destroyed over the following decade. Pflager’s sketches are now some of the only surviving documentation for many of the structures that once formed the fabric of Mill Creek Valley. The sketches were shown in a Missouri Historical Society-sponsored exhibition titled Elegant Memories at the Jefferson Memorial (now the Missouri History Museum) in St. Louis in 1962.

Pflager was highly engaged with the St. Louis art community. The artist, whose husband served as president of the City Art Museum’s Board of Trustees, founded and served as first president of Friends of the Art Museum, and also served as president of the St. Louis Junior League. In addition to her involvement with the St. Louis Artists’ Guild, she was also a member of the Studio Group, a group of sixteen St. Louis women artists who met regularly to study with Fred Conway.

Pflager was also an amateur playwright and poet. Her poems were published in The Junior League magazine, and she wrote a children’s play, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, in 1928.

Pflager’s career lasted until 1963, when she died of breast cancer. She is buried in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis.