“Unconventional Perspective: Works by Julia Leaycraft 1885-1960”

If you ever wanted proof that the Hudson Valley has been harboring future cult artists in attics, carriage houses, and wintered-in studios for a century, meet Julia Leaycraft. The Woodstock Artists Association & Museum is currently exhibiting “Unconventional Perspective: Works by Julia Leaycraft 1885–1960”—the first time in 75 years her work has been assembled. The show, containing over 30 paintings, lithographs, and drawings, will be up through January 6. This month’s cover features her painting Village in Winter, a snow-globe scene from the POV of a benevolent surveillance drone. 

Born in 1885 and raised in Kingston, Leaycraft was not the type to wait for permission. Vassar class president, magazine editor, art columnist, advocate, mother, former Dalton School art department chair, Theosophist, public intellectual, and eventually a single woman building a life in Woodstock when that was still more declaration than lifestyle choice. She studied at the Art Students League, learning from William Merritt Chase and Frank DuMond, and fell under the colony’s creative spell during formative summer sessions in Woodstock between 1907 and 1910. 

That Leaycraft then chose an unconventional orbit feels almost redundant. Her mother was a novelist and suffragist connected to Susan B. Anthony. Leaycraft gravitated naturally toward women’s networks and built some of her own, founding the Intercollegiate Bureau of Business Occupations to help place college-educated women into careers. She wrote for the Theosophical Society’s Beacon and penned weekly art dispatches for the Ulster County News. 

Leaycraft also worked at The Delineator, which began in the 19th century as the house organ of Butterick sewing patterns and ended up, improbably, as a national engine of feminism, fiction, and social reform. Think Vogue if it unionized, discovered modern art, and occasionally tried to save the republic. 

But it’s the paintings where city grit meets country radiance—that make her legacy undeniable. Her work is representational, but not obedient. Brushstrokes roam. Perspective wanders. Village in Winter is classic Leaycraft: a familiar place made unfamiliar by choices that prioritize mood over realism. It’s Woodstock, but Woodstock after a long simmer in the imagination—rooflines bumped, roads tilted, trees placed by narrative instinct instead of surveyor precision.  

To call her palette “American Scene” is accurate in the way calling Joni Mitchell “folk” is accurate—technically correct, spiritually insufficient. She painted garages, baseball games, apple trees, studios, children at play, Manhattan speedways, Haitian markets, and snowy turnoffs on Rock City Road. She painted not for documentation but revelation.  

Her life split productively between New York City dynamism and Woodstock’s rural wilds, she made both vibrate with life in her work. In East River, Manhattan’s infrastructural optimism coils outward from above, traffic arteries braided toward steel bridges. Woodstock Baseball is a crowd scene rendered loose and sunwashed—children swinging by a cemetery, the American pastime played cheek-by-jowl with eternity. 

Then Haiti, 1953. In her late 60s, Leaycraft traveled with artist Zulma Steele, painting markets, villages, families, and mountains in tones both structural and ecstatic. By the time she painted her late self-portrait, in 1950, she holds three brushes in one hand, canvas in the other, hair faceted into cubist geometry. She looks less like she’s capturing reality than negotiating terms with it.

The story here isn’t rediscovery, exactly. It’s recognition that Leaycraft knew exactly what she was doing, long before the rest of us caught up.

This article appears in December 2025.