John Stockton De Martelly

John Stockton De Martelly was an accomplished painter and printmaker who established his career in Kansas City during the 1930s. He was born in Pennsylvania to a French father and British mother, both of whom immigrated to the United States in the 1890s. He was seen to have talent from an early age in watercolor and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He then traveled to Italy and London to continue his study of art. He studied at the Royal College of Art in London and was known to do political cartooning while in England.

De Martelly moved to Kansas City, Missouri, and began working in 1934 as a member of the faculty at the Kansas City Art Institute in graphic arts. In 1937 John married fellow artist Janet Spaeth. While at the Art Institute, KCAI lithography faculty member William McKim posed for the lithograph Blue Valley Fox Hunt (1937) by De Martelly. His many awards include gold medals and special prizes. He won the Lighton Prize for best painting in the 1937 Midwestern Artists’ Exhibition. In 1939, he served on the graphic arts committee for the New York World's Fair.

He served as head of the Department of Drawing and Graphic Illustration through 1941. In 1941, Thomas Hart Benton, who headed the Painting Department at the Kansas City Art Institute, was fired. John De Martelly was reportedly offered the job as the head of the Painting Department but departed the college in protest. De Martelly went to work at Michigan State University. He served as artist-in-residence in 1946 and taught lithography there for more than twenty years. 

De Martelly also worked at a studio in Nelson, New Hampshire, during the summer. He used the rural American landscape as his subject and, before the mid-1940s, was considered to be a Regionalist. At that time his work became more abstract, influenced by the work of Honore Daumier. He died on December 31, 1979. Today his works belong to many prestigious museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, both in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.