Joan Scott Blue

Joan Blue was a painter with a brief career in St. Louis in the 1930s. A pupil of the well-known St. Louis artist Mabel Meeker Edsall, Blue was recognized at a young age for her talent in landscape painting.

Primarily interested in mood and atmosphere rather than detail, Blue’s interpretations of scenes in rural Missouri often explored areas of related and contrasting colors. In an anecdote published in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in 1938, Blue describes how her painting, Sahara, was not actually a depiction of the Sahara desert, which Blue had never seen, but was titled based on the responses of viewers who were reminded of a desert scene.

The only apparent exhibition of Blue’s work in St. Louis was a solo exhibition at John Burroughs High School in 1938, which featured thirty of the artist’s landscape compositions, including titles such as Sahara, Blue Mood, Moonlight, Distant Horizons, Dixie Highway, Ozark Hills, House by the Missouri, and Beach Grass. She died in August of 1985.