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Biography
Betsy Graves Reyneau (1888–1964) was an American painter, best known for a series of portraits of prominent African Americans once owned by the Harmon Foundation. Mary McLeod Bethune, George Washington Carver, Joe Louis, and Thurgood Marshall were among her sitters. Reyneau was raised in Detroit, and as a young woman attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She later lived in France for a time before returning to the United States and becoming active in civil rights causes. Reyneau was also a suffragette; she became, in 1917, the first woman to be arrested and imprisoned for protesting Woodrow Wilson's stance on women's voting rights.
Many of Reyneau's portraits are currently in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution. She was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 1996.