James Scripps Booth

James Scripps Booth (May 31, 1888 – September 13, 1954) was an artist and automotive engineer.

The eldest of George Gough Booth and Ellen Booth's five children, James was born on May 31, 1888 in Detroit, Michigan. He received his education at private schools, he left school before graduating from the tenth grade. By this time, his artistic gifts were well recognized.

At 22, Booth married Jean Alice McLaughlin in 1910 in Detroit. The young couple traveled abroad and lived for a period in Paris, where Booth studied at the École des Beaux-Arts. They also spent time in Etaples, France with Michigan-born artist Myron Barlow, who taught Booth the fundamentals of working with pastels. Booth quickly took to the medium and thereafter preferred it to all others.

He accepted and completed two important commissions in 1917. One commission, from the directors of the Evening News Association, called for him to render a series of pastel drawings of the soon-to-be-vacated Detroit News Shelby Street plant. The second commission came from his father, who wished to have a set of Cranbrook scenes for his own home. Following the completion of these works, Booth moved to Pasadena, California with his wife and children. First in his El Molino home and later in a home he designed for himself on Linda Vista, Booth built studios where he executed an extensive body of work, primarily pastel drawings of nudes and clothed models set in the surrounding hills. Many of these were exhibited at the Detroit Museum of Art and the Scarab Club, where they were well received.

In the 1930s, Booth established a studio and automotive workshop in Indian Village in Detroit. Here, he spent considerable time reworking and brightening his earlier pastels and producing works far more colorful than those he had executed previously. During this period of his life, he maintained an active interest in the work his parents were carrying on at Cranbrook.

Prior to the death of his wife Jean in July, 1942, Booth discontinued teaching his automotive courses. Booth remarried on February 20, 1943 to Ellen Catherine Norlen. Wishing to remain near his parents, the couple took up residence in Grosse Pointe. There, after the death of George Booth in 1949, James began to edit Cyril Player's biography of his father (published in 1964 as The Only Thing Worth Finding).

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