The Artists: Hugh and Jeanette McKean

Hugh McKean moved to Orlando from Pennsylvania as a boy. He earned his bachelor's degree from Rollins College in 1930 and joined its faculty in 1932, later heading its art department. He studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, Art Students League in New York City, the École des Beaux-Arts at Fontainebleau in France, and Harvard University. The Tiffany Foundation also selected him in 1930 to join other artists at Laurelton Hall, Louis Comfort Tiffany’s mansion at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, under Tiffany’s tutelage. In 1940, he received his master's degree from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. McKean served as the president of Rollins College from 1951 to 1969 and the director of the Morse Museum of American Art from 1942 until his death in 1995.

Jeanette McKean (née Genius) was a painter, interior designer, and trustee and benefactor of Rollins College. Born in Chicago, she visited her grandfather, Charles Hosmer Morse, in Winter Park. On one summer visit in 1926, she enrolled in a course at Rollins, touching off a lifelong interest in the college. In 1942, Jeanette Genius founded the Morse Gallery of Art on the Rollins College campus, naming it for her grandfather. She appointed Rollins art professor Hugh McKean as the gallery’s director, and in 1945, she married him.

Hugh and Jeanette McKean will also be featured in Art Legends exhibitions at the City of Orlando Terrace Gallery (October 15, 2015 through January 8, 2016).