They Met in St Louis: Dorothy and Charles Quest

St. Louis was the nation’s fourth biggest city, and boasted the world’s largest railroad station, when it hosted the 1904 Summer Olympics and the world’s fair called the Louisiana Purchase Exposition — which featured extensive art exhibits. That year Charles Quest was born and, not long after, Dorothy Johnson.

The Missouri metropolis was a major center for fine arts. Its art academy trained native son George Aid, who went to Paris in 1899 on scholarship; Aid lived in Europe for 15 years before settling in the emerging Tryon colony. Many serious professional artists joined St. Louis Artists Guild, founded in 1886, which constructed handsome new quarters in 1908. As a youth Charles drew images after the Old Masters on his bedroom walls. He and Dorothy both attended Soldan High; its facilities included three mechanical drafting rooms and four art rooms with skylights for studio work. (Tennessee Williams, student there a year, wrote of the impressive Gothic-Revival school in his famous play The Glass Menagerie.)

A club for serious professionals, the Artists Guild built this handsome building in 1908.

Charles Quest oil on canvas at Tryon Congregational Church
photo by Rob Meeske 2025

Both then entered the School of Fine Arts at Washington University, America’s first degree-granting art training academy in a university. For fun they performed in the Municipal Opera outdoor-theatre chorus. Dorothy and Charles eloped in September, 1928 and headed for Paris and a long honeymoon. They rented a Left Bank studio. It was a heady atmosphere, with lots of artists and writers in their neighborhood. Doors away sculptor Alexander Calder was first developing his innovative wire sculptures. After six months they sailed back to America and spent a month soaking up the art scene in New York. They returned to their home city just when the Great Depression crushed the optimism of the Roaring Twenties.

Dorothy Quest      Dolls 1933 oil on canvas
courtesy Dorothy Kirk, photo by Rob Meeske

In the Tryon colony, George Aid sold his vineyard to devote his time to commissioned portraiture and teaching at his atelier. Felicia Judson Calhoun, widow of a prominent St. Louis attorney, was involved in Tryon Garden Club’s crusade to save Pearson’s Falls glen from loggers, to transform it into America’s first preserve celebrating botanical diversity. Watercolor painter Amelia Watson sold her charming cottage, because it was marketable, to keep afloat. The early Thirties were tough for practically everyone, yet many creative people found ways to keep going without joining the breadlines.

Restored interior St. Mary’s, Helena
National Register of Historic Places

The Quests’ mural behind the altar is unique. Painted on brick, it deploys casein (derived from milk) as binder, used by ancient Egyptian painters. Dorothy spent hours on her knees with mortar and pestle grinding raw color pigments, to mix with eggs and casein from local farmers. They added pulverized mica to give their paint subtle reflecting glow, from altar candles and Eames’ intricate electric globes fabricated of brass. Charles Quest’s painted saints, angels, and God figures are arrayed flat on the wall plane. Dorothy Quest’s bequest paid half the cost to restore it professionally in 2006 for $60,000.

Charles designed other murals – for two schools and a new library in St. Louis, for two Episcopal churches there, and for the 1933 Century of Progress exposition in Chicago. He produced some sculpture, worked in stained glass, and took up lithography and aquatint and woodcut printmaking. His lithograph By the Road was exhibited at New York’s 1939 world’s fair. He painted prolifically. Quest’s art won more than 50 prizes and awards during his long career; his works were exhibited by a hundred museums and were acquired for the permanent collections of many including institutions in London, Paris, Stockholm, Jerusalem, Australia and New Zealand. New York commercial galleries that represented him were Guy Mayer, George Binet, and Weyhe. In 1944 he joined the teaching faculty at Washington University. In ’51 the American embassy in Paris showed his painting at the Petit Palais, followed by a tour around France. US Information Service showed Quest in their “20th Century American Artists” that toured Asia and Oceania for two years.

Thick, gritty paint evokes sand, cement and rough-hewn wood depicted in Charles Quest’s circa-1935 oil on canvas The Builders. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.

Dorothy with her portrait of Pierre Laclede

Dorothy went on her own independent career in teaching and art-making. She taught in public schools at Clayton, a St. Louis suburb, then Sacred Heart Academy for girls. She was especially supportive to women in the arts, hosting a course at her home studio. She went to Columbia University in New York the summer of 1937. She became art department chair at Maryville College in 1945. While Charles’ postwar oeuvre trended to the abstract and avant-garde, her painting remained rooted in appealing portraiture of the marketable kind. Her commissions included major donors to charitable institutions, industrialists, and a historical portrait of Pierre Laclede (founder of the city) for the exclusive Saint Louis Club.

Charles 1948 wood engraving Still Life with Vise
courtesy Saint Louis Art Museum

After the second world war, St. Louis recovered economically and resumed growing. All was not well, however. Its considerable Catholic community was convulsed with controversy about racial integration. In 1946 Joseph Ritter, archbishop of Indianapolis who had already integrated Catholic schools (inciting the Ku Klux Klan in 1938 to burn a cross in front of his residence), was transferred to St. Louis and set about integrating hospitals and schools. Among his first acts was to integrate a Catholic girls’ college in Webster Groves (where the Quests lived) near the town’s Frederick Douglass High School, a public school for Blacks with a distinguished history. In ’47 Ritter moved to integrate all Catholic schools, which set off a firestorm – some parents threatened to sue on the basis of desegregation violating Missouri law at that time. The Pope backed up Ritter, who was elevated to the rank of Cardinal.

St. Louis’ Roman Catholic archdiocese decided to renovate the historic Old Cathedral – near where Eero (son of Eliel and partner of Charles Eames) Saarinen’s iconic Gateway Arch was to be constructed. Ritter sent Charles and Dorothy Quest to Spain in 1960, to study Diego Velasquez’s famous painting Christ Crucified at The Prado museum. The original is eight feet tall. The Quests built a new studio to accommodate a canvas replica fourteen feet tall, installed above the altar of the renovated 1831 basilica in Gateway Arch park next to Mississippi River. Their project took a year to complete.

Cardinal Ritter passed away in 1967. That year the Saint Louis Club honored Charles with a gallery hung with his paintings of old St. Louis landmarks, figure paintings and political satires, and the couple were honored with honorary lifetime memberships. In 1969 Dorothy and Charles Quest relocated to Tryon. In 1970 they bought a secluded Hillswick Road home on five acres in Gillette Woods where they spent the rest of their very active lives.

Portrait of banker John Landrum, courtesy Rita Landrum

Dorothy took a studio, above Owens Pharmacy on Trade Street in downtown Tryon, to paint portraits. For the Lanier Library she painted a dual portrait of donors Arthur & Elizabeth Farwell that hangs beneath the Palladian window of their fiction room. For Saint Luke’s hospital she painted doctors Bosien, Bradshaw, and Preston. She joined Tryon Painters & Sculptors and taught portrait technique for several years at Tryon Fine Arts Center. There she choreographed dances for Lovely Ladies and Kind Gentlemen for Little Theatre’s stage production in 1977.

At the Congregational Church she led the “Slimnastics” aerobic exercise class for twelve years, and arranged burials for Charles’ and her remains in its memorial garden. She died in 1995, having accomplished more than 700 portraits during her seventy-five years’ life as a professional artist.

Dorothy’s 1980 sketch of Tryon Congregational Church

Charles continued print work in his Gillette Woods studio and painted as well. For pleasure more than to sell, he created colored sketches caricaturing world political figures. He was represented locally by Trade Street Gallery which offered for sale some of his most avant-garde works. Greenville County Museum of Art, in South Carolina, purchased his mixed-media Cain and Abel.

Charles F. Quest, The Last Peace Conference, 1981. Oil on canvas, 83 ¼ x 48 inches. Asheville Art Museum, gift of Trade Street Gallery, 1982.01.21. © Estate of Charles F. Quest

Asheville Art Museum acquired his startling satire The Last Peace Conference which had been exhibited in his one-man show at the Mint Museum in Charlotte; it was exhibited at the 1982 world’s fair. Other paintings were donated to their church and lent to Tryon High and to the seniors Meeting Place. Before his death in 1993, his wood engraving was exhibited in a Museum of Modern Art show in New York along with prints by Picasso, Rauschenberg and many other famous names.

Lemons and Wine Oil on Panel
courtesy Cindy Davis

His still-lifes with heavy impasto and nonconventional compositions are among his best-known Tryon paintings. Charles and Dorothy Quest bequeathed their records and memorabilia, and a fund to support preservation of its extensive prints collection, to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

Charles Quest carving a woodcut in his studio at 200 Hillswick Road, Tryon, NC 1972
courtesy Hampton III Gallery, Taylors S.C.
photo by James T. Hammond