Eda Lincoln Cushing

Eda Lincoln Cushing was a painter who was active in St. Louis, Missouri, in the mid-twentieth century. Cushing was born in St. Louis in the late-1800s; her father worked as a business manager at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. However, the artist actually lived and worked for most of her career in the nearby suburb of Webster Groves.

Cushing studied at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts under Fred Conway, a leader in progressive art circles in St. Louis. Through Conway, Cushing came to be affiliated with the Studio Group, an organization of Conway’s former students with Conway as their de facto leader. The group regularly met on Wednesday evenings to work on technique with Conway. Cushing also later became involved with the Missourians, a progressive group of local artists whose number included fellow artists Mabel Meeker Edsall and Jessie Beard Rickly.

While many of Cushing’s associates’ work was overtly political, Cushing concentrated on less controversial subject matter such as landscapes and seascapes. But stylistically speaking, Cushing was anything but conservative. Pushing toward abstraction, her work was evocative, gestural, and was described by some critics as highly personal. Another characteristic of Cushing’s compositional style was her bold use of color, similar to her St. Louis contemporary and close colleague, Belle Cramer.

The artist painted a wide variety of subjects, but often tended to focus on nautical themes. In her more abstract work, such as the celebrated Mariner’s Dream, Cushing evoked the depth, turbulence, and mystery of the sea through regions of advancing and receding color, producing a tension between the surface of the canvas and background objects. One critic noted how one of Cushing’s paintings contained “the sweep and swirl of wind and sea”  (St. Louis Globe-Democrat, November 29, 1939).

During her career, Cushing’s work was shown throughout the American Midwest in cities such as Cincinnati, Dayton, Denver, Kansas City and Springfield, Missouri, and she maintained a frequent exhibition schedule in the St. Louis area until the early 1960s, when she seems to have scaled back her professional work. She died in 1991 in Olivette, Missouri.