Factory and Old Man

Sarah Blakeslee began her lifelong passion for art with an education from the Art Institute of Chicago, then the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC, and finally the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. During her schooling years, she also received scholarships to study abroad, which allowed her to gain perspective and inspiration from the work of European masters. When she returned to the United States, she married Francis Speight, one of the instructors from her time at the Academy. The couple moved to Greenville, North Carolina, around 1936, where they would spend the rest of their life.

Blakeslee synthesized Impressionism and Realism to create lively, colorful depictions of her surroundings. Her paintings matter-of-factly depicted the rural and post-industrial South, particularly at a time when many of the industries that catapulted North Carolina into modernity, like textile mills, slowed and were then shuttered.