Alma Thomas's Watercolors

Mid-20th century

This ordinary set of Sargent Art® brand watercolor paints has an embossed metal lid that opens to reveal eight pans of color. Paint splatters on the inside of the tin evidence that it was used by its owner, painter Alma Woodsey Thomas. Color was central to Thomas’s work. She distinguished herself from the Washington Color School in the 1960s and developed the colorful expressionist style for which she is best known. In her words: “Through color, I have sought to concentrate on beauty and happiness, rather than on man’s inhumanity to man.”