Norman Millet Thomas (American, 1915 to 1986)
Norman Thomas grew up in Portland and graduated from Portland High School in 1933. He studied at the Portland School of Fine Arts, which has become the Maine College of Art, the National Academy of Design in New York City, and the American Academy in Rome, Italy. In 1938, he was awarded a Pulitzer traveling scholarship of $1,500 for a mural of lobster fisherman on the back shore of Long Island in Casco Bay. Thomas served as a combat artist for the U.S. Coast Guard during World War II.
Several of his paintings of action in Greenland were published in Life magazine. (He had to repaint them after the originals were lost at sea.) He sketched the amphibious assaults at Leyte, Luzon, and Iwo Jima. A Luzon sketch of two Coast Guardsmen supporting a wounded soldier became the design for the Coast Guard War Memorial bronze in Battery Park in New York City, sculpted by Thomas. The memorial was dedicated in 1955, and a replica was dedicated in Baltimore in 1959.
Thomas’ later years were spent mostly in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he was a producer of the 1961 film El Brazo Fuerte by Giovanni Korporaal, which was banned in Mexico because it criticized government corruption. From about 1965 to 1970 he was in Los Gatos, California, where he became part of the group of artists who gathered at the nearby Studio 88 in Campbell. He died at Cuernavaca May 11, 1986 at the age of 70. His ashes were scattered over Casco Bay.
Information courtesy of Barridoff Galleries, August, 2009.