Jessie Beard Rickly

Rickly was born in 1895 in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, 200 miles south of St. Louis, and attended High School in nearby Leeper, Missouri. At the age of eighteen, as soon as her parents would allow, she struck out on her own and moved to St. Louis. She studied at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts under Edmund Wuerpel and Oscar Berninghaus. She was a member of Shikari, an honorary sorority consisting of artists who attended the St. Louis School of Fine Arts and founded by Rickly’s close friend, Aimee Schweig. She also studied at Harvard and received a summer scholarship for her studies there.