Julia Searing was born inSaugerties, New York, and raised inKingston, New York, the daughter of John Welch Searing and Annie Eliza Pidgeon Searing.[1] Her father was a lawyer and newspaper editor, and her mother was a writer and suffragist.[2][3][4] Her grandfather,Frank Pidgeon, was a noted baseball player in the nineteenth century.[5]
As a young woman, Searing was on the staff ofNew Idea, and managing editor atThe Delineator. DuringWorld War I, she worked in publicity for theYWCA. She taught art at theSlater Memorial Museum in Connecticut.
Leaycraft was founder and first president of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Occupations, an employment service for college-educated women.[9] She was also a founding member of theWomen's City Club of New York. She was chair of the art department at theDalton School from 1928 to 1932. She was elected vice-president of theWoodstock Library Association in the 1930s.[10][11]
With her children grown, she spent more time on painting and printmaking in the 1930s and 1940s, but she was also involved in theNational Youth Administration, in building what became the Woodstock School of Art.[12] She exhibited her art, with shows in Woodstock, Albany, and New York City. She was active in the Woodstock Artists Association, theNational Association of Women Artists, and other professional organizations. In 1947, she chaired a committee to raise funds for a war memorial in Woodstock.[13] In 1959 she contributed folk song lyrics, remembered from her childhood, to a concert of Catskills-area traditional music.[14]
Searing married lawyer and real estate broker Edgar Crawford Leaycraft in 1913. They had two children. She moved to Woodstock with her children in the 1920s, and lived there with another artist,Anita Miller Smith, in 1922 and 1923. The Leaycrafts divorced in 1929.[20] She died in 1960, in New York City, at the age of 75.[21]
