Molly Luce was born in Pittsburgh, grew up in Glen Ridge, New Jersey and graduated from Wheaton College in the class of 1916. She trained at the Art Students League in New York from 1916-18 and then from 1919-22 studied under Kenneth Hayes Miller, F. Luis Mora, George Bellows and others.
There, she was part of a remarkable group of students which included Lloyd Goodrich, Reginald Marsh, Alexander Brook, Yasuo Kunioshi, Peggy Bacon, Betty Burroughs, and her brother, Alan Burroughs, whom Luce married in 1926. Luce had her first one-woman show at the Whitney Studio Club (later the Whitney Museum) in the fall of 1924, just after her return from Europe.
The reviews were enthusiastic and emphasized Luce's rootedness to her heritage as well as her commitment to developing her own style of painting. A critic for "Art News" said "Suburbia" (and other paintings) "have the kind of vitality that it is a pleasure to discover in young American painters, for it proves that our coming artists are discovering themselves early." She has found something in her own environment that is worth recording, and when artists do that a great period is born. Her style of painting is definitely her own. There is a rhythm of line in it, solidity of structure and a vibrant quality of surface attained by a modified use of such elongated swirls of color as Van Gogh used. Clearly, Molly Luce had arrived on the New York scene with the "American Scene."
She continued to exhibit at the Whitney, at least fifteen times in the Annual and Biennial Exhibitions up to 1950 and in at least six special theme exhibitions. One of the high points of her career came in 1934, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought her painting, "Beach at High Tide". The purchase was the museum's second from a living woman artist and was followed by another acquisition in 1940. The Whitney Museum acquired its first Luce painting in 1928, followed by a second in 1941. Since that time, the Currier Gallery in Manchester, New Hampshire and the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, as well as other distinguished public and private collections, have acquired her works.
In 1980-83, she was the subject of a long overdue retrospective exhibition of fifty-five works entitled "Molly Luce: Eight Decades of the American Scene." This show traveled to thirteen museums across the United States. In addition, her work was included in an inaugural exhibition "American Women Artists 1830-1930," at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. in 1987. Molly Luce's place as an important and enduring American woman painter of the 1920's, 30's and 40's seems assured.