Mitchell Jamieson

Mitchell Jamieson
Self-portrait working in Charlotte Amalie, US Virgin Islands, in the 1930s
Born	1915 Kensington, Maryland
Died	1976
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Abbott Art School, Corcoran School of Art

Mitchell Jamieson (1915–1976) was an American painter. Jamieson was commissioned to paint a mural in what is now the Stewart Lee Udall Department of the Interior Building to commemorate Marion Anderson's famous concert at the Lincoln Memorial on April 9, 1939. Titled An Incident in Contemporary American Life, the mural is still on view to the public who visit the building. His works are in collections at the White House, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Seattle Art Museum.

Life

Mitchell Jamieson's 1943 mural An Incident in Contemporary American Life, at the United States Department of the Interior Building, depicts the scene of Marian Anderson's 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial

Jamieson was born in Kensington, Maryland, in 1915. He studied at the Abbott Art School and the Corcoran School of Art.

Early Career with the WPA

In the 1930s, he traveled to Key West and the United States Virgin Islands to paint under the Treasury Department's Art Project, and received commissions to paint murals for post offices in Upper Marlboro and Laurel, Maryland; Willard, Ohio; and at the Main Interior Building in Washington, D.C.

World War II Combat Artist

During World War II, Jamieson served as a combat artist in the U.S. Navy. He sketched and painted the occupation on North Africa, the invasion of Sicily, the invasion of France, and the Okinawa invasion.

Death

Jamieson shot himself at his Northern Virginia home in 1976, a few years after returning from Vietnam. As journalist Paul Richard described the circumstances in the Washington Post:

"On Feb. 4, 1976, the artist Mitchell Jamieson shot himself to death in his house in Alexandria. There was something in his art, in his masterful yet hideous drawings of Vietnam, that pointed toward his suicide. Jamieson the hero, Jamieson the victim, had become at last another casualty of war.

Vietnam scarred us all, but it gnawed at Jamieson and would not let him heal. He spent less than a month there in 1967, but until the day he died he could not and he would not stop remembering and drawing the horrors he had seen and those he had dreamed.

Historians in the army sent him there to draw. They were sure that he could take it, for he'd been to war before. Jamieson saw action, in Africa and Sicily, on Utah Beach and Iwo Jima, as a Navy combat artist during World War II.

He drew his fellow GIs then as martyrs and crusaders. By the time he got to Vietnam he saw them as the plague.

References

• Biography

 This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the Bureau of Reclamation.