Charles K. Gleeson, painter and printmaker, was born to John and Rose Mullen Gleeson on 5 March 1878 in St. Louis, Missouri. He studied at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts between 1904 and 1907, at the Art Students League in New York in 1908, and at the Académie Colarossi and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris from 1909 to 1910. While living in Paris he exhibited etchings at the Paris Salon. After completing his studies, Gleeson traveled to the Netherlands, Spain, and Mexico.

Gleeson returned to St. Louis and became an art instructor at the Central High School and married the sculptor Adele Schulenburg on 31 October 1914. In the 1930s, the couple moved to Connecticut. He was a member of and exhibited with the Chicago Society of Etchers, the Society of American Graphic Artists, and the St. Louis Art Guild. Gleeson‘s work was also exhibited in the exhibition American Art Today at the World’s Fair New York 1939, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts from 1944-1958. In May 1917, Gleeson and Schulenburg had a two-person show at the Saint Louis Art Museum.

The work of Charles K. Gleeson is represented in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; the British Museum, London; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania; the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; and the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Charles K. Gleeson died in Meriden, Connecticut in April 1971.