Lea was born on July 11, 1907, in
El Paso, Texas, to
Thomas Calloway Lea Jr. and Zola May (née Utt).[2][3] From 1915 to 1917, his father was
mayor of El Paso. As mayor, his father made a public declaration that he would arrest
Pancho Villa if he dared enter El Paso, after Villa raided
Columbus, New Mexico on March 9, 1916.[2] Villa then responded by offering a thousand pesos gold bounty on Lea.[2] For six months Tom and his brother Joe had to have a police escort to and from school, and there was a 24-hour guard on the house.[4][5]
In 1927, he wed Nancy June Taylor, a fellow art student. In 1930, Norton suggested that Tom take an art tour of Europe to study the masters. He and Nancy went to
Paris and saw an exhibit of
Eugène Delacroix at the
Louvre, and Delacroix was his "favorite". Next they traveled to
Florence,
Orvieto,
Rome,
Capri. Then, after a four-month tour, it was back to
Le Havre to catch the
SS Ile de France.[7]
After the tour of
Italy, they moved to
Santa Fe to be with other artists and be in the Southwest. When Nancy became ill (a botched
appendectomy), they moved to El Paso, and Lea found work from the New Deal art projects.[8]
In 1937, he started doing illustration work, and this led to a partnership with a friend of his father, author
J. Frank Dobie. Dobie wrote about the rough life of settling the Texas frontier and Lea's illustrations are mostly of cowboys and the wild Texas landscapes.[6] While painting a mural in
El Paso Federal Courthouse (Pass of the North), he met and married his second wife, Sarah Catherine Beane (née Dighton), in July 1938.[citation needed] Sarah had come from
Monticello, Illinois, to El Paso to visit friends. Sarah had a son, James (Jim), from a previous marriage whom Lea adopted.[citation needed] While painting his courthouse mural, Lea also met artist
José Cisneros and they were able to connect as friends and business contacts.[10] That same year his started his lifelong partnership with Carl Hertzog (Jean Carl Hertzog Sr.), an El Paso book designer and typographer. 1937–1938 would prove to be the antithesis of 1936, providing Lea with three lifelong partners and friends.[11]
In 1940, he applied for and won Rosenwald Fellowship, but by the end of the summer of 1941, he got a telegram from LIFE asking him to go to sea with the
United States Navy on a North Atlantic Patrol. In the fall of 1941, he decided to paint for LIFE as war artist and correspondent aboard a destroyer.[12] He traveled all over the world with the United States military from 1941 to 1945. This included: China, Great Britain, Italy, India, North Africa, North Atlantic, the Middle East, and the Western Pacific. He went on deployment with the aircraft carrier
USS Hornet in the
Pacific Ocean in 1942, where he met the famous Army Air Corps pilot
Jimmy Doolittle. Lea was on board the Hornet (September 15, 1942) when the
USS Wasp was sunk by torpedoes from a Japanese submarine.[13] He painted several pictures of the sinking of the Wasp. In 1943, during his visit to China, he met
Theodore H. White, and he painted the portraits of Generalissimo
Chiang Kai-shek and his wife,
Soong Mei-ling; and General
Claire Lee Chennault, leader of the Flying Tigers.[6]
It was during his time in the western Pacific in 1944 as a combat correspondent with the
United States 1st Marine Division during the invasion of the tiny island of
Peleliu that he would really make a name for himself among the readers of LIFE. "My work there consisted of trying to keep from getting killed and trying to memorize what I saw and felt," Lea says.[14] His vivid, realistic, images of the beach landing, and
Battle of Peleliu, would impact both readers and himself. The Price and That 2,000 Yard Stare would become among his most famous works.[6] (1,794 Americans died in a two-month period in what many call the war's most controversial battle, due to its questionable strategic value and high death toll.[15][16])
The painting was done with devotion and without haste ...
— Tom Lea On: Study for Sarah in the Summertime[17]
In 1947, Lea finished a graphite sketch on kraft paper of his wife called Study for Sarah in the Summertime. He had started the sketch two years earlier, about six months after he got home from the war. The life size work (71" × 30¼") was based on a photograph, taken of Sarah in the backyard of their home at 1520 Raynolds Boulevard in El Paso, that he had carried in his wallet throughout the war. An oil painting, Sarah in the Summertime (67" × 32"), was then done from the sketch. He spent longer on this combined work than any other painting.[17][18]
After finishing his last novel, The Hands of Cantu (an account of horse training in 16th-century
Nueva Vizcaya) in 1964, Lea traveled to Boston to meet with his publishers,
Little, Brown and Company. He told them that he wasn't interested in another novel, so they suggested a book about his pictures. This 1968 work, A Picture Gallery, was his "autobiography", writing of why and when he did his paintings. Working on A Picture Gallery would lead him to once again focus on painting and turn away from working on literature.[19] Right before finishing this work,
Baylor University paid tribute to his writing by bestowing him, and his long-time friend Carl Hertzog, with an honorary doctorate's in literature.[20][21] The El Paso Museum of Art established its Tom Lea Gallery in 1996, and in 1997 he was honored as a Fellow in the Texas State Historical Association. President
George W. Bush had Lea's painting Rio Grande displayed in the Oval Office.[22]
Lea died in El Paso on January 29, 2001, at the age of 93.
My friend, the artist Tom Lea of El Paso, Texas, captured the way I feel about our great land, a land I love. He and his wife, he said, "live on the east side of the mountain. It's the sunrise side, not the sunset side. It is the side to see the day that is coming, not to see the day that has gone."
1960: The Primal Yoke, A Novel. – Boston: Little, Brown and Company. –
1306682
1964: The Hands of Cantú. – Boston: Little, Brown and Company. –
1379124
Works about
Lea, Tom (illustrations), and the Fort Worth Art Center, (1961). – Tom Lea. – Fort Worth, Texas: Fort Worth Art Center. –
79168047
Lea, Tom (illustrations and interviews), Rebecca McDowell Craver and Adair Margo, (1995). – Tom Lea: An Oral History. – El Paso, Texas: Texas Western Press. –
ISBN978-0-87404-234-4
Lea, Tom (illustrations), and Kathleen G Hjerter, (1989). – The Art of Tom Lea. – College Station, Texas: Texas A & M University Press. –
ISBN978-0-89096-366-1
2003: "A Memorial Edition". – College Station: Texas A&M University Press. –
ISBN978-1-58544-282-9
Lea, Tom (illustrations), and Brendan M Greeley, (2008). – The Two Thousand Yard Stare: Tom Lea's World War II. – College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press. –
ISBN978-1-60344-008-0
^Steinberg, Rafael. – "World War II: Island Fighting". – Alexandria, Virginia: Time-Life Inc. – 1998.
^Moody, Sid. – "1,794 Americans Died For An Unneeded Pacific Island". –
Associated Press. – (c/o Seattle Times). – September 11, 1994. – Retrieved: 2008-07-04
^Zeiler, Thomas W., (2004). – Unconditional Defeat: Japan, America, And The End of World War II. – Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, Inc. – p.105.
ISBN978-0-8420-2990-2
^
abLea, – Tom Lea, A Picture Gallery: Paintings and Drawings, – p.98.