A $100,000 bequest from the estate of renowned artists Arthur Osver, a professor of art at Washington University for 21 years, and Ernestine Betsberg, his wife of more than six decades, will create a new scholarship fund in Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.

The Ernestine Betsberg and Arthur Osver Scholarship will be awarded to students and recent alumni of the Sam Fox School’s College and Graduate School of Art who demonstrate significant artistic ability and future artistic promise. To be eligible, students must have completed at least one full academic year in painting, sculpture or printmaking, while alumni must have earned a degree in one of those fields within the previous five years and be current MFA candidates. The first round of Osver Scholarship recipients will be announced in fall 2008.

Born in Chicago in 1912, Osver studied at Northwestern University and the Art Institute of Chicago, where he met Betsberg, a classmate who also would become an accomplished painter. After winning fellowships to Paris — Osver in 1936, Betsberg in 1937 — the couple married in 1940 and moved to New York City, where Osver taught at the Brooklyn Museum and Columbia University.

In 1960 Arthur was brought to Washington University by Kenneth Hudson, dean of art, who had previously hired the painters Philip Guston and Max Beckmann. (Guston, who had befriended Arthur in New York, encouraged him to take the job.) In 1962 Arthur and Ernestine purchased an 1851 farmhouse in Webster Groves, where they lived and worked for more than 40 years.

Arthur died in 2006 at the age of 93. Ernestine died in 2007 at the age of 94.