Arrah Lee Gaul was born in Philadelphia in 1883 as the daughter of a Methodist minister. She graduated with a degree in art from the Moore Institute of Art, Science and Industry in Philadelphia. She went on to graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania and then returned to Moore to join the faculty and become head of its art education department. She studied art in France, but is more famous for her trip to the Orient in which she spent seven years in Japan, Hong Kong, and a short while in India. She planned on visiting Egypt, but her trip was put off due to the Suez Canal incident. She spent most of her artistic life traveling, and won the honor of being the first woman artist accepted into many art competitions and art societies, including the Philadelphia Art Club and several Japanese art competitions. She is well known for her portraits and landscapes, which tended to emphasize the happier and more appealing aspects of these subjects. Upon her death in 1980, she donated 200 of her paintings to Illinois Wesleyan, a campus she had visited only once. Her father had received an honorary doctorate in theology from Illinois Wesleyan. Because of her dedication to her father, she had stipulated that these works would be donated to the university upon her death.
From the description of The Aarah Lee Gaul Collection, [1916-1999] (Illinois Wesleyan University). WorldCat record id: 489258181
