A painter and printmaker, she was born in Worchester, Mass., grew up in Sharon, Mass., and showed a talent for art as a young child.
She was married to Michael Hicks-Beach in 1928, and the couple moved to Brooklyn, New York, where she studied figure drawing and painting at the Pratt Institute and took classes at the Brooklyn Museum School in drawing and painting with artist Alexander Brook. In 1942, she moved back to her parent's house in Connecticut, helping her father deliver telegrams to the families of soldiers killed in World War II. After her divorce in 1944 she moved to Los Angeles, California, where she drew cartoon cells for Warner Brothers' "Tom and Jerry" among other jobs.
In 1948 she married the director of animation, William Asbury King, and the couple spent the first 18 months of their marriage in Paris, France, where Mrs. King studied painting with Andre L'hote at the Academy de la Grande Chaumiere. Upon their return to Los Angeles, Mrs. King studied at the University of California in Los Angeles, and began gaining attention for her abstract impressionist paintings. She had her first major solo show at the Pasadena Museum of Art in 1959.
By the mid 1960s, she was registrar for the La Jolla Museum School, in La Jolla, California. She also studied printmaking with Paul Lindgren at the University of California, San Diego. In the early 1980s, she and her husband moved to McLean, Virignia, where she helped found the Washington Printmakers Gallery in 1985 and became a founding member of the Columbia Pike Artist Studios in Arlington. She also was a member of the Washington Print Club and the Artists Equity Association. Mrs. Stratton King's intaglio prints and her paintings have hung on the walls of the World Bank, the Tunisian Ministry of Culture, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Russia, the Long Beach Museum of Art and U.S. embassies through the Arts in Embassies program. Her works are in the collections of the Georgetown University Fine Print Collection, the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington. They are also in numerous private collections in the U.S. and abroad.
Mrs. King returned to San Diego after her husband's passing in 1990, and in 1994 a retrospective of her work was held at the University of San Diego's Founders Gallery. She moved back to Virginia in 1996. Dorothy Stratton King died at the age of 98, on June 14, 2007 of heart and lung failure at Sunrise of Arlington. Sources include:
Obituary. The Washington Post, June 28, 2007 (page B07)
Information courtesy of Marianne Stahl
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