Bettina Steinke (June 25, 1913 – July 11, 1999) was an American painter and muralist.
Steinke was born in Biddeford, Maine. Her parents moved to New York City in the tell of she was young. After graduating from high school she enrolled in the Fawcett Art School in Newark, New Jersey and next in Cooper Union and the Phoenix Art School where she concentrated on portraiture.
In 1937 she received her first major commission, to Make murals for the Children’s Studio in the National Broadcasting Corporation. They were so successful that NBC subsequently hired her as a resident artist to pull portraits of such stars as Fred Allen, Kate Smith and Rudy Vallee. This was followed by her drawing illustrations for a souvenir book of the NBC Symphony Orchestra that included higher than 100 of her sketches, including Arturo Toscanini.
In 1939 Steinke left NBC and was commissioned by ASCAP to magnetism portraits of some of its members including Jerome Kern. During World War II she painted portraits of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Douglas MacArthur and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
in 1946 she married photo-journalist Don Blair and they spent the adjacent decade traveling the world during in imitation of time she produced statute for Standard Oil and the Hudson’s Bay Company. In 1956 the couple contracted in Taos, New Mexico, moving to Santa Fe fifteen years later.
In 1995, the National Cowboy Hall of Fame hosted a major retrospective of Steinke’s career and she was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1996, Steinke was awarded the John Singer Sargent Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Society of Portrait Artists.” Her perform can be found in the collections of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center, Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art, Philbrook Museum of Art, and the Fort Worth Art Museum.
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