Major works
Commissions that put him in American history.
1931
Seven national parks for the Paris Exposition
On January 12, 1931, National Park Service Director Horace M. Albright announced that a 21-year-old Yale student would paint the national parks for the Paris Colonial Exposition. The Park Service had seen Kingman's Sierra paintings from the summer before.
He painted seven, from January to April 1931: Grand Canyon, Mt. Rainier, Yellowstone (Old Faithful), Yosemite (Half Dome), Crater Lake, Grand Teton, Sequoia. Six are 36 x 44 inches; the Sequoia is 36 x 68. After Paris they went back to Washington. Four are held today by the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service.
1937
Crater Lake and Yosemite Through the Ages
In late 1935 Kingman painted two series showing how Crater Lake and Yosemite Valley were formed. The paintings were shown at the Carnegie Institution in Washington that December.
Thirteen of them, seven of Crater Lake and six of Yosemite, illustrated Wallace W. Atwood Jr.'s article in the March 1937 National Geographic. They were reprinted in America's Wonderlands in 1959. The family still holds the paintings.
1937–39
New Deal post office murals
Kingman won three competitions held by the Treasury Department's Section of Fine Arts, which commissioned art for new federal buildings during the New Deal.
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1937 · Hyattsville, Maryland
Maryland Countryside
Five panels for the post office, tempera on canvas.
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1938 · Kemmerer, Wyoming
Scenes of Prehistoric Wyoming
Three panels, about 100 square feet: a fossil excavation, Triceratops and fossil fish. He spent a winter studying dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History, painted the panels in the RISD mural studio, and drove them west.
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1939 · East Providence, Rhode Island
Hurricane 1938, The Seekonk River and East Providence
Three panels with a gold-leaf border of railroad tank cars.
1948
The New York Times world map
For the lobby of The New York Times at 229 West 43rd Street, Kingman painted a view of the earth from cartographer Richard Edes Harrison's designs, years before anyone had seen it from space. He painted it in the basement of the Joslyn and finished it in the Times lobby, signing it in November 1948. Across the top run Susan Coolidge's lines: "Every day is a fresh beginning... Every morn is the world made new."
The mural came down in the late 1980s and was stored rolled up. In 2014 the Times gave it to the Joslyn Castle Trust in Omaha. Conservator Kenneth Bé of the Ford Conservation Center restored it, and it was unveiled in Omaha in June 2016. Since April 2026 it has hung in the new Omaha Central Library.
Later commissions
1954
Omaha Waterfront During the 1870's
Painted for the Omaha World-Herald's centennial issue. Given by the family to the Durham Museum in 2019.
1968
The Missouri River dams
Six paintings of the mainstem dams, from Gavins Point to Fort Peck, for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Kingman also designed the visitor exhibits at the dams' powerhouses.
1970
Water in the desert
Twelve paintings of the Bureau of Reclamation's projects in Arizona and at Lake Mead. His work was in the Bureau's show at the National Gallery of Art in 1972.
Public collections
Where his work hangs
Institutions that hold works by Eugene Kingman.
- Department of the Interior and National Park Service, Washington
- Four of the 1931 Paris Exposition paintings
- Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha
- Paintings including Melting Snows, No. 2, Cold Corner and Pioneer Trail into Council Bluffs; lithographs
- Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa
- Arkansas Cabin and lithographs
- Library of Congress
- Lithographs, including Ozark Farm (Pennell Collection, 1943)
- Yale University Library
- Five lithographs, 1937
- Museum of Nebraska Art, Kearney
- Melting Snows and Missouri River near Tekamah
- Denver Art Museum
- Cliff Ruins #1, Mesa Verde, lithograph
- The Durham Museum, Omaha
- Omaha Waterfront During the 1870's, 1954
- Joslyn Castle, Omaha
- Corn Country #1 and #2; the Kingman Room and Gallery
- Providence Art Club
- Jaffrey Farm, the 1929 prize painting
- Clark University, Worcester
- Portrait of Wallace W. Atwood Sr., 1938
- U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Omaha District
- Six Missouri River dam paintings, 1968
- Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
- Microfilm of the Eugene Kingman papers