Elizabeth Davey Lochrie
1890-1981
Abstract by Paul Koch

Elizabeth Davey Lochrie was born in Deer Lodge, 1 July 1890.  She specialized in Native American portraits and created murals in hospitals and public buildings.  Her life was spent in early Montana settlements with "braid" Indian neighbors; she was educated in Butte schools and received her art education at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1911.

During 1924-1925 she painted eighteen children's murals for the Montana State Hospital.  After 1931 Lochrie specialized in Native American portraits, particularly of Blackfeet tribal members, having produced more than a thousand water colors, oils, murals and sculptures.  The price of her lectures frequently was a donation of clothing and other necessities for needy members of the tribe.  She was adopted by the Blackfeet and given the name "Netchitaki" which translates as "Woman alone in her way."

The Blackfeet say, "She came to us from over the Western mountains, this white woman.  She was friendly and understanding.  We brought her into the medicine teepee and made her our sister."

From 1937 to 1939, Lochrie painted historic murals in the post offices at Burley and Saint Anthony, Idaho and in Dillon and Galen, Montana.  She studied with Winold Reiss at Glacier National Park and from 1936 to 1939, she was staff artist for the Great Northern Railroad in Glacier National Park.  Lochrie died in 1981.