Janet Spaeth De Martelly

Janet Spaeth De Martelly was a sculptor active in Kansas City during the 1930s. She was born in Maine in 1910. Her mother, Marie Haughton Spaeth, was a celebrated Impressionist painter. Her father was a professor at Princeton who specialized in literature and Shakespeare. She grew up surrounded by the arts in their New Jersey home, inspiring her to study at the Fine Arts School of Princeton and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. She later won a scholarship to continue her studies abroad in Munich, Germany. 

Janet moved to Kansas City in 1936 with her family, after her father was hired as president at the University of Kansas City. In 1937, she married John Stockton De Martelly, a lithographer teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute. For several years, Janet De Martelly developed her sculpture among other Kansas City artists. Her time in Kansas City culminated in a joint exhibition with her mother at the Kansas City Art Institute where she displayed sculptures and her mother showed paintings. 

In 1941, John De Martelly resigned from the Kansas City Art Institute in protest after Thomas Hart Benton was fired. John and Janet De Martelly then moved to East Lansing, Michigan, where he taught lithography at Michigan State University. The couple spent summers in the Spaeth family summer home in Nelson, New Hampshire, where both artists had studios. 

In 1966, Janet De Martelly died in a car accident while she and her husband were driving from Michigan to their summer home. John De Martelly was stricken with grief, devoting his 1970 retrospective exhibition to her and including in the catalog a personal poem about loss. 

One of Janet de Martelly's most notable sculptures is a clay bust of Sharon Wood, one of her friends, completed around 1962. After her death, John De Martelly had the sculpture cast in bronze to commemorate her artistic accomplishments.

Janet De Martelly left a unique mark as a female sculptor from the early twentieth century. She carried on the artistic legacy of her mother, Marie Spaeth, and laid the foundation for the creative careers of her children and grandchildren, including artists Johanne De Martelly and Song Nelson.