Ernie Barnes
Ernest Barnes was born in Durham, North Carolina in 1938. His father was a shipping clerk and his mother a housekeeper for attorney Frank L. Fuller Jr.
Gifford Beal
Gifford Beal was an American painter, printmaker and muralist, whose early work was associated with the Ashcan School. Early Life and Education Gifford Beal was born in New York in 1879, the youngest of six children. His father, William Reynolds Beal, his oldest brother, Reynolds Beal, and his niece, Marjorie Acker, were all accomplished painters. Beal’s formal [...]
Peter Beard
Peter Hill Beard was an American artist, photographer, diarist, and writer who lived and worked in New York City, Montauk and Kenya. His photographs of Africa, African animals and the journals that often integrated his photographs, have been widely shown and published since the 1960s.
James Carroll Beckwith
James Carroll Beckwith was an American painter whose powerful portraits, murals and paintings of historical monuments are part of permanent museum collections around the world. He signed his work Carroll Beckwith. Early Life and Education James Carroll Beckwith was born in Hannibal, Missouri in 1852, and raised in Chicago, where his father opened a wholesale grocery business. [...]
George Bellows
George Bellows (1882-1925)photograph c.1920 by Nickolas Muray George Bellows turned down an offer to play baseball with the Cincinnati Reds and, instead, became one of the greatest American painters and chroniclers of the twentieth century. Early Life and Career Bellows was born in 1882, in Columbus, Ohio. Bellows mother was 40, and his father 50, [...]
Frank Weston Benson
Frank Weston Benson was one of America's greatest Impressionist painters. He was one of The Ten who exhibited together in order to advance creativity and originality in American art. Benson was extremely masterful with oils and watercolors and the etchings he did, of wildlife, hunting and fishing, were so in demand that the wildlife and sporting print itself [...]
Oscar Bluemner
Oscar Bluemner was called The Vermillionaire by other artists because of his use of brilliant reds and bold colors. Bluemner was a driving force in the creation of American Modernism. Early Life and Education Oscar Bluemner was born in Prenzlau, Germany in 1876, to a family of artists and artisans. In 1885, Bluemner was given a solo exhibition at [...]
John George Brown
John George Brown was one of the most popular artists in America at the turn of the twentieth century. His empathetic, and highly skilled, portrayal of children on the streets of New York made him a successful artist, whose works have been exhibited and sought out by collectors for more than a century. Early Life and Education [...]
Charles Burchfield
Charles Burchfield was an American artist, known for his startling, dreamlike watercolor landscapes and lithographs. Early Life and Education Charles Burchfield was born in Ashtabula Harbor in 1893. He was raised in Salem, in Ohio, by his widowed mother. Many of Burchfield’s paintings are of views from the house in Salem, and of the house itself, where [...]
Paul Cadmus
Paul Cadmus was an American Modern Realist painter and printmaker. Like the Italian Renaissance painters he admired, Cadmus’ work was meticulous and technically brilliant.
Charles Caryl Coleman
Charles Caryl Coleman was an American painter, associated with the Aesthetic Movement, who found his muse on the island of Capri. Early Life Charles Caryl Coleman was born in Buffalo, New York in 1840. Coleman studied with noted painter William Holbrook Beard, who lived in Buffalo for a brief time to help create an art community, which [...]
John Steuart Curry
John Steuart Curry was an American Regionalist painter, illustrator, muralist and printmaker. His paintings of rural America were a comfort to many during the Great Depression. Early Life and Education John Stuart Curry was born in 1897 in Dunavant, Kansas, a town whose population was just 85 people in 1910. His parents, Smith and Margaret Curry, were [...]
Stuart Davis
Stuart Davis was an American painter whose European influences, combined with his American sensibilities, made him one of the most important modern painters of the twentieth century. Early Life and Education Stuart Davis was born in 1892, to a family that encouraged his talents from an early age. His father, Edward Wyatt Davis, was the art editor [...]
Maria Oakey Dewing
Maria Oakey Dewing was an American flower painter, and an important role model for women in the arts at the turn of the twentieth century. Early Life and Education Maria Oakey was born in New York City in 1845. She was the fifth of ten children born to Sally and William Oakey. William Oakey was in the [...]
Jean Dubuffet
Jean Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor who brought a wild and savage style of art to post-war France and America. “Man’s need for art is absolutely primordial,” he said, “as strong as, and perhaps stronger than, our need for bread. Without bread, we die of hunger, but without art we die of boredom.” Early Life [...]
Edmund Dulac
Edmund Dulac was a French-born, naturalized British painter, author and illustrator, whose work is as charming and sought after today as it was when he created it, in the first half of the twentieth century. Early Life and Education Edmund Dulac was born in Toulouse, France in 1882. Although he showed a penchant for drawing and painting [...]
Mabel Dwight
Mabel Dwight (1876-1955) was one of America’s leading lithography artists in the first half of the twentieth century. She was a keen and compassionate observer of the human condition. Dwight, an only child, was burnin Cincinnati, raised in New Orleans and traveled extensively throughout her life. She studied painting at the Hopkins School of Art in San [...]
John Joseph Enneking
John Joseph Enneking (1841-1916) was one of America’s first great impressionist painters. After the loss of his parents when he was young, and being wounded and taken prisoner by the Confederates while serving as a Union soldier during the Civil War, Enneking went to Boston to begin his career as an artist. He studied in Paris and [...]
Richard Estes
Richard Estes was born in 1932 in Kewanee, Illinois, but moved to Chicago at an early age. He remained there to study at the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1950s, where his training centered on figure drawing and traditional academic painting, the style that interested him most. Estes is one of the foremost proponents of the Photo-Realist movement, [...]
Walton Ford
Walton Ford in his studio, 2017 Walton Ford is an American artist, whose works combine history, science and mythology to explore the effects that humans and the environment have on birds and mammals. Early Life and Education Walton Ford was born in Larchmont, New York in 1960, one of four children. Walton's father, Enfield Berry [...]
Frederick Frieseke
Frederick Frieseke (1874-1939) was born in Michigan. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York, and left for France in 1898, when he was twenty four. He remained in France for the rest of his life, and was the most popular living American artist at the height of his [...]
Abbott Fuller Graves
Abbott Fuller Graves (1859-1936) was an American artist, illustrator and educator who studied in Paris with Georges Jeannin, one of the most famous flower painters in Europe. Graves taught at the Cowles Art School in Boston and, in 1891, opened his own art school in Kenebunkport, Maine. Graves kept his connection with Jeannin, make occasional tips to [...]
Emile Gruppe
Born in Rochester, New York, Emile Gruppe (1896-1978) became a renowned New England landscape and marine painter. Although he is best known for his variety of Impressionistic landscapes, he also painted figures and portraits. His modern style was largely inherited from French Impressionist Claude Monet. "Lily Pads," date and location unknown, one of Gruppes landscapes, attests to [...]
Robert Gwathmey
Born in Richmond, Virginia, Robert Gwathmey (1903-1988) became an artist known for his Social Realist depictions of life in the rural South. He was one of the first white artists to create dignified images of African-American people and did so in a style that was modernist with many geometric forms and bold colororation. He spent most of [...]
Childe Hassam
Through his work and deeds, Childe Hassam helped to bring Impressionism to mainstream America. Early Years Frederick Childe Hassam was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts. His father’s cutlery business was destroyed in the Great Boston Fire of 1872. Although an uncle offered to send him to Harvard, Hassam chose, instead, to take a job to help support his [...]
Robert Henri
Born Robert Henry Cozad in Cincinnati, Ohio, he became one of the leading personalities in American art, known for his teaching skills, ethnic portraits, especially spirited children, and insistence that artists should adhere to social realism and give rein to their own artistic instincts. During his growing up years, he lived between Cincinnati and Cozad, Nebraska, founded [...]
Reggie Burrows Hodges
Reggie Burrows Hodges was born in Compton, California in 1965. His childhood in Compton has been the inspiration for many of his paintings. He attended the University of Kansas, where he studied theater and film. Hodges worked at various jobs in television and film production. He spent time in Brooklyn, where he became co-owner of Bass Mind Recording Studio and also co-founded the reggae dub band Trumystic. Hodges played the bass and wrote songs for the band.
Winslow Homer
Photograph of Winslow Homer taken in N. Y., 1880Albumen print by Napoleon Sarony, American, 1821-1896.Gift of the Homer Family, Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Quiet, thoughtful and seclusive, Winslow Homer became one of America’s most beloved artists. Homer was able to capture the raw beauty of people, the land and, especially, the sea. Early Life [...]
Robert Indiana
Robert Indiana was one of America’s most renown contemporary artists. His iconic works are recognized throughout the world. "LOVE by Robert Indiana, 1995" Photo by Dick Thomas Johnson CC BY 2.0 Early Life and Education Robert Indiana was born in New Castle, Indiana in 1928. He was adopted by Earl and Carmen Clark, who moved [...]
Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland was an American painter. He was one of the best-known American Color Field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was thought of as a minimalist painter. Noland helped establish the Washington Color School movement.
Hughie Lee-Smith
Hughie Lee-Smith an African-American artist, born in Eustis, Florida in 1915. In 1938, he graduated with honors from the Cleveland School of Art and worked for the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration, creating paintings that focused on social justice and racial equality.
Sam Francis
Samuel Lewis Francis was born in San Mateo, California in 1923. His father was a mathematics professor, his mother was a pianist. Francis attended San Mateo High School.
Francis Coates Jones
Genre-figure painter Francis Coates Jones (1857-1932), was born in Baltimore, Maryland. Jones first expressed an interest in art in 1876 when visiting Edwin Abbey. Jones and his brother, H. Bolton Jones, a painter of landscapes, then worked at Pont-Aven, Brittany, in an artists' colony attended by Robert Wylie and Thomas Hovenden. Pont-Aven would soon become famous for [...]
Louis Aston Knight
Louis Aston Knight (1873-1948) was the son of the American expatriate painter, Daniel Ridgway Knight. Louis Aston Knight was born in America and began studying art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art. In 1872, he traveled to Paris and continued to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Thereafter, he remained in Europe, and studied in the academic [...]
Jacob Lawrence
Jacob Lawrence was an African-American painter known for his portrayal of African-American life.
Ernest Lawson
Canadian-American painter, Ernest Lawson (1873-1939) was a member of the group of eight, a group of artists which included the group's leaders Robert Henri, John Sloan, William Glackens and others. Though he painted mainly landscapes, he also did some realistic urban scenes which were shown at the 1908 exhibition of the Eight. Though considered an impressionist, Lawson's [...]
Norman Lewis
Norman Lewis was an Abstract Expressionist painter, scholar and teacher, who used his art and his teaching to focus on black urban life and his community’s struggles.
Richard Lindner
Richard Lindner (1901-1978) was born in Hamburg, Germany and is well known for his quirky POP artworks. His style blends a mechanistic cubism with personal images and haunting symbolism.
Louis Lozowick
Born in Ludvinovka in the Ukraine, Louis Lozowick (1892-1973) became best known for his lithographs of skyscrapers, constructions, and machinery, a series spanning fifty years. He attended the Kiev Art School from 1904 to 1906 and emigrated to the United States at age 14. In New York, he studied for three years at the National Academy of [...]
George Luks
George Luks (1867-1933) was born in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Luks received his first art instruction from his parents who pursued painting as a hobby. At seventeen he entered the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Later he went to Düsseldorf where he lived with a distant relative, a retired lion-tamer. He abandoned Düsseldorf for the more stimulating spheres of [...]
John Marin
John Marin (1870-1953) was born in Rutherford, New Jersey. His father was a public accountant; his mother died only nine days after his birth. He was taken to his maternal grandparents with whom he lived in Weehawken, New Jersey. His grandparents, with their son and two daughters were the only parents Marin was to know; it has [...]
Emily Mason
Emily Mason was an American abstract painter and printmaker. Mason developed her individual approach to the Abstract Expressionist and color field painting traditions with her veils of color and spontaneous gestural mark. Mason was born and raised in New York City, where she lived and worked until her death.
Henri Matisse
French artist, Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the [...]
William Paxton
William McGregor Paxton(June 22, 1869 – 1941) William McGregor Paxton’s great talent and skill gave him entrée into a world he wasn’t born to, but which he captured beautifully on canvas. Paxton was born into a working class family. His father ran a catering business in Newton Corner, Massachusetts in the mid-1870s. Finding His Muse [...]
Edward H. Potthast
Edward H. Potthast (1857-1927) was an American Impressionist painter. He is known for his paintings of people at leisure in Central Park, and on the beaches of New York and New England. His work is included in many major museums in the United States. He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. From June 10, 1879 to March 9, [...]
Maurice Prendergast
Maurice Prendergast was one of America’s most original painters. His works, although labeled Impressionist, have both a European and American sensibility, but are unlike the works of other artists of his time. Maurice Prendergast, 1913 Prendergast was, during much of his lifetime, a painter’s painter. It wasn’t until around the start of World War 1, [...]
Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations. Rauschenberg was both a painter and a sculptor and the Combines are a combination of both, [...]
Robert Riggs
Known for his paintings of prize-fighting and circus-genre scenes and lithography of gigantic size compositions, Robert Riggs (1869-1970) had a highly successful career as an artist, especially in the 1930s and 40s. His painting "The Brown Bomber," showed the boxing victory of Joe Louis over Max Schmeling. This is one of the paintings that earned Riggs election [...]
Kent Rockwell
Growing up in a genteel family in New York City, Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) was a member of the rugged realist school of landscape painters as well as a popular illustrator and printmaker. His 1930 illustrations for Moby Dick are among his most lasting achievements. He was the first American artist to have work exhibited in the Soviet [...]
Norman Rockwell
Norman Rockwell circa 1950. Norman Rockwell Museum, Licensed by Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, IL. "I love to tell stories in pictures. The story is the first and the last thing. That isn’t what a fine art man goes for, but I go for it.” — Norman Rockwell Early Life and Education Normal Rockwell was born [...]
John Singer Sargent
Recognized as the leading portraitist in England and the United States at the turn of the century, John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was acclaimed for his elegant and very stylish depictions of high society. Known for his technical precocity, he shunned traditional academic precepts in favor of a modern approach towards technique, color and form, thereby making his [...]
Palmer Schoppe
Palmer Schoppe's (1912-2001) artistic leanings were evident since childhood so that his brief year at Yale and then the New York Art Students League from 1930 to 1934 was natural. Upon his return home to Santa Monica, after four years of jazz and blues in New York and in the Gullah community of South Carolina and in [...]
Alfred Sisley
Alfred Sisley (1939-1899) was a French Impressionist painter who in 1862 joined the studio of Charles Gleyre, which Monet, Renoir and Frederic Bazille also attended. When Gleyre's studio closed in 1863, Sisley went on to paint with Monet, Renoir and Bazille. His first paintings reflect the Barbizon school traditions but with independent style. Sisley's paintings were accepted [...]
Hunt Slonem
Born in 1951, Hunt Slonem is an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker. He is best known for his Neo-Expressionist paintings of tropical birds, often based on a personal aviary in which he has been keeping from 30 to over 100 live birds of various species. Slonem's works are included in many important museum collections all over the world.
John Sloan
Born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, John Sloan (1852-1931) became one of the major early 20th- century figures in New York, pioneering the Social Realist movement with Robert Henri and his circle. He was also an illustrator and early eastern painter in the Southwest. Sloan moved with his family to Philadelphia where he attended Central High School and [...]
Raphael Soyer
Born in Borisoglebsk, Russia, Raphael Soyer (1899-1987) is identified as a Social Realist painter because of his interest in the common man, although he avoided subjects that were particularly critical of society. Soyer moved with his family to the Lower East Side of New York City in 1913, after they were deported from Russia by the Tsarist [...]
Joseph Stella
Born in Muro Lucano, near Naples, Italy, Joseph Stella (1877-1946) is best known for his painting Brooklyn Bridge, 1919 a futurist work that is an icon of the Industrial Age. He arrived in the United States in 1896 and studied medicine and pharmacology and then attended the Art Students League under William Merritt Chase. From 1900 -1909, [...]
Mark Tobey
Mark Tobey (1890-1976) was a painter of small abstract works with underlying religious themes as well as an illustrator and muralist. Tobey remains known primarily for his "white writing" paintings that give the impression of being expansive and much larger than they actually are.
Everett Longley Warner
Genre-figure painter Francis Coates Jones (1877-1963) was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He first expressed an interest in art in 1876 when visiting Edwin Abbey. Jones and his brother, H. Bolton Jones, a painter of landscapes, then worked at Pont-Aven, Brittany in an artists' colony attended by Robert Wylie and Thomas Hovenden. Pont-Aven would soon become famous for Paul [...]
Max Weber
Max Weber (1881-1961) was born in Russia and at age ten emigrated with his family to the United States, settling in New York City. Weber is considered one of America's earliest modernists, and his long career witnessed many stylistic changes. Through the 1920s his work paid homage to such European artists as Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo [...]