Edmund Minor Archer

Edmund Minor Archer was born in Richmond in 1904 to a family interwoven into the city’s culture. His great-uncle, William Ludwell Sheppard, was a famous lithographer, painter, and sculptor in Richmond in the 1800s. His father, William Wharton Archer, was a local newspaper editor and award-winning fiction writer. His mother, Rosalie Pleasants Archer, stepped in as president of the Little Theater League of Richmond after her oldest son – the theater’s founder – died of the Spanish flu in 1918. Devotedly religious and condemning of social and racial inequality, she was an active member of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, a Richmond committee focused on interracial relations, and a council dedicated to the prevention of lynching. Edmund had three brothers: Adair Pleasants Archer (1894-1918), Sheppard Archer (1898-1899), and William Wharton Archer Jr. (1902-2000).

Archer began studying painting with Richmond artist Nora Houston at the age of eight, and later also studied with Adèle Clark. He graduated from St. Christopher’s School at 16, attended the University of Virginia for a year, and then spent the following three years at the Art Students League of New York.

Archer returned to Richmond in 1926 after a year of travel and study in Europe, and devoted the next four years to painting – some of that time in the studio of sculptor Edward Virginius Valentine on Leigh Street. His first one-man exhibition was in Boston in 1929.

In 1930, he became associate curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, remaining there for 10 years. He gave up the position to devote his full time to painting, specializing in portraiture, figure and mural paintings. During World War II, he served in the 603rd Camouflage Engineers in Washington, D.C. After the war, Archer remained in the city to teach at the Corcoran School of Art, where he was considered the institution’s most conservative instructor (in terms of technique and his avoidance of abstraction). All the while, he continued painting.

He won acclaim and was in exhibitions across the country, with his portraits of African Americans drawing particular attention. Thomas C. Colt, Jr., director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, wrote in the program notes for a 1938 exhibition dedicated to Archer at the VMFA:

Archer was a founder of the Hand Workshop – now, the Visual Arts Center of Richmond (VisArts) – in 1963, about the time he stopped painting. The mission of the workshop was to provide free education and training in arts and crafts for community children otherwise shut off because of their race or lack of financial means.

He retired from teaching in 1968 and died in Richmond in 1986.

Sources

• Personal records and archives of Edmund Archer.
• L. Moody Simms Jr., “Edmund Minor Archer
  (1904–1986),” Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 1998. (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.php?b=Archer_Edmund_Minor, accessed September 24, 2024).
• Times Dispatch, March 8, 1945