Frances Keffer

Working in an impressionistic manner, Frances Alice Keffer depicted both floral still lifes and landscapes, often with a good deal of impasto.

Keffer was born in Des Moines, Iowa, and her interest in art was nurtured from the time she was in kindergarten. She was a graduate of West High School and won a scholarship to the Cumming School of Art (formerly the Des Moines Academy of Art). Keffer was also a student at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. In 1908 she went abroad, studying with Frank Brangwyn of London and in Holland with Alexander Robinson. While abroad, she participated in Robinson’s “traveling school,” and with it she made a trip to Algiers, the capital of Algeria. Another instructor was Ossip Linde, a Russian-born artist who settled in Connecticut. 

Keffer’s teaching career began in 1904 and lasted fourteen years. She was the first regularly employed art teacher in Des Moines and in 1909 was appointed the art supervisor of the local schools. In 1910 she went on a sketching trip to Holland and Spain, and possibly Italy. A 1911 article about the “real art atmosphere” in Des Moines profiled a dozen women; it stated that Keffer’s “achievements in art cover the various branches of craft tools, leather, wood carving, metal work, and china painting.” The diversity of talents no doubt proved useful in her role as teacher, although in her own work, she was primarily a painter who used both oils and watercolors.

In 1918 Keffer left Des Moines and moved to Hillsdale, New Jersey, remaining there for twenty years until she joined her mother in San Diego, California, where she resided for twelve years before her death. Extant paintings document that Keffer was quite a traveler; in this country she visited New Hampshire and the Carolinas. She also traveled to China and through Italy and Paris, once with her mother in 1937.