William Cumming (1917-2010) was a painter and a member of the Northwest School of artists. A figurative painter, Cumming was more interested in conveying a sense of bodies in motion rather than capturing realistic details. His paintings make extensive use of outline and pattern to define shapes and spaces, and the faces of his figures are often obscured or featureless. Cumming starting exhibiting his work in the early 1940s, but his career was interrupted for several years by his involvement in politics and bouts of ill health. He returned to painting in the late 1950s, exhibiting widely and teaching art classes at the Burnley School of Professional Art (later the Art Institute of Seattle).

Here, William Cumming and his wife Sue Cumming (nee Kruger) look through art work in his studio in their home, a 145-acre farm near Issaquah.

Caption information source: “Cumming, William (1917-2010)” by Deloris Tarzan Ament, HistoryLink, retrieved from https://www.historylink.org/File/5221.
Caption information source: “An artistic oasis far from city tumult,” by Jean Hudson Lunzer, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 20, 1971, Northwest Today section page 10.