Florence Elliott McClung

Florence Elliott White McClung

Florence McClung, painter, printmaker, and art teacher, daughter of Charles W. and Minerva (McCoy) White, was born at St. Louis, Missouri, on July 12, 1894. She moved to Dallas in 1899 and lived there until her death. She graduated in 1912 from Bryan High School in Dallas. Her early educational direction centered around being a pianist, but in the early 1920s she began to study art in the Dallas studios of Texas artists C. F. (Frank) Reaugh, Frank E. Klepper, Olin H. Travis, Alexandre Hogue, and Thomas M. Stell.

She painted for periods in Taos, New Mexico, circa 1928-32, joining a circle that included Hogue, Mabel Dodge, and Tony Luhan. By 1939 McClung had become an established artist: one of her paintings (Lancaster Valley, 1936) had been purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York-the first and only Texas artist to be so honored up to that time; she had been head of a university art department for some ten years; and she had accomplished notable work in painting and printmaking, exhibiting widely and winning awards.