As a young child, Cynthia Brants was interested in drawing and painting, persuading her parents to enroll her in Saturday classes at the Fort Worth School of Fine Art at about age ten. There, under the tutelage and encouragement of Blanche McVeigh and others (Sallie Gillespie, Evaline Sellors, Wade Jolly, and Sallie Blyth Mummert), she was exposed to drawing in charcoal and pencil, painting in watercolor and oils, and printmaking, an art medium she continued to perfect until her death.
Brants attended Sarah Lawrence College, located just outside New York City, from 1941-1945. She had the unique opportunity to study with Kurt Roesch, a working painter and former master in the Berlin Academy. Following graduation from Sarah Lawrence and the end of World War II, Brants traveled extensively in Europe, absorbing and cultivating her love of the arts. She also established her first studio in Fort Worth. Some of her fellow classmates in the childhood Saturday classes—Bill Bomar, Bror Utter, and Veronica Helfensteller—also pursued careers in art. In the 1940s and 50s they, along with Brants and other artists, came to be known as The Fort Worth Circle.
In 1979, Brants relocated permanently to Granbury, Texas, establishing a working studio and assisting singer and actress Jo Ann Miller as scenic designer and painter in the renovation and rebirth of The Granbury Opera House. From the late 1950s until the early 1970s, Brants also taught—at her alma mater, Sarah Lawrence College, and, closer to home, at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas. From 1960 to 1972 she painted a number of commissioned portraits in Connecticut, Texas, and Maine, which led to her being presented to Her Majesty, the Queen Mother, at the presentation of Brants’s commissioned portrait of Lady Reading to the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service in London in 1972.
With few exceptions, Cynthia Brants sketched, drew, painted, sculpted or did print- or set-making each day of her life for sixty plus years. Her personal papers, housed here in the Robert E. Nail Jr. Archives, are just as extensive, including documents, photographs, exhibitions catalogs, correspondence, personal journals, and more.
Molly Sauder, Archivist and Librarian
