Irma Sompayrac Willard was born in 1897 in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana. In 1916, she graduated from the Louisiana State Normal School in Natchitoches. She then enrolled at Newcomb College in New Orleans where she became a member of Alpha Omicron Pi. Her sophomore year was spent in New York City where she took special work. She graduated with a Bachelor degree in design from Newcomb in 1920.
In 1921, she and a Newcomb Kappa Kappa Gamma member, Gladys Breazeale, founded the Natchitoches Art Colony. Newcomb professors Ellsworth Woodward and Will Henry Stevens taught classes. The Natchitoches Art Colony is the South’s first art colony. The colony produced southern indigenous art. It started as an en plein landscape painting school. During the Depression it included arts and crafts.
She spent some time working in New York City as artist for an advertising agency. Her passport application, filed in anticipation of a trip to Europe in 1924, describes her as 27 years of age and 5’3”. She had a dark complexion a medium face, dark brown eyes, a straight nose, a medium forehead and a regular mouth. Her hair was black. She planned to sail out of New York in July on the Cleveland. She stated she would visit France, Italy and England where she hoped to study art.
On Monday, June 14, 1926, she married David Milne Willard, Jr. in her parents’ home. After a summer spent in Louisiana, the couple back to New York, where they were going to live on Long Island. Her husband was a writer and real estate developer, according to the published wedding announcement. She returned to her family home in Louisiana as often as possible. A son, Daniel David Milne Willard was born in April 1927.
A 1931 To Dragma reported that Alice Moise, a 1928 Newcomb graduate and member of the Alpha Omicron Pi chapter, attended the Natchitoches Art Colony and was the guest of her cousin, Irma Sompayrac Willard. Irma was invited to teach on Munich, according to another report in a 1935 To Dragma.
She earned a Masters degree at Columbia University in 1954. At some point she returned from the east coast to Louisiana and designed a house which today is a bed and breakfast (see below). From 1950 to 1965, she was supervisor of art for the State Department of Education of Louisiana. After her return to Natchitoches, she became involved in several historical and cultural organizations. A newspaper article described her as a “residential historian for colonial Louisiana and author, artist and art critic.” Irma Sompayrac Willard died in 1991.
