Vernon Thomas (artist)

Vernon Thomas^[5] made prints, watercolors, pastels, and oil paintings, mostly portraits of children, or illustrations of children at play.^[6] Her art appeared on the covers of magazines including The Woman Citizen in 1926.^[2] She created more than a dozen Good Housekeeping covers between 1934 and 1936.^[7][8][9] She was a member of the Chicago Society of Etchers, and exhibited her works in Chicago,^[10] Washington, D.C.,^[11] Los Angeles,^[12] and internationally.^[3] While in Chicago she worked with fellow printmaker Bertha Jaques.^[13] In 1928, she won the Mrs. Julius Rosenwald Purchase Prize at the Art Institute of Chicago exhibition, for "Cut-outs".^[14]

Thomas married three times. She married fellow artist Earle Rosslyn Kirkbride in 1918. The Kirkbrides divorced in the late 1920s.^[15] She married Spencer T. Rudd soon after; he died by suicide in 1932.^[16] She moved to New York City, and married her third husband, publisher Maurice Chaffee Leigh, in 1945; he died in 1955.^[17] She died in 1962, in Hartford, Connecticut, in her late seventies.^[3] Her works are held by museums including the Smithsonian American Art Museum^[18] and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.^[19]