Virginia Cuthbert was born in 1908 in West Newton, Pennsylvania. She was a magic realist or surrealist artist painting moody pictures of people in architectural settings. There are also American Scene or Regionalist aspects to her work in the 1930s. Among many covers painted for Fortune Magazine, the June, 1951 issue depicts a powerful image, both realistic and symbolic, of an aluminum production plant with a foreground filled with red pipes converging to a black building sending smoke to a darkly expressive sky. In January, 1956 her cover painting of the White House was sent to President Dwight D. Eisenhower for his Gettysburg farm.

Cuthbert received her B.F.A. degree in 1930 from Syracuse University. Aided by an August Hazard fell...