Horace Pippin

Horace Pippin (February 22, 1888 – July 6, 1946) was an American painter who painted a range of themes, including scenes inspired by his service in World War I, landscapes, portraits, and biblical subjects. Some of his best-known works address the U.S.'s history of slavery and racial segregation. He was the first Black artist to be the subject of a monograph, Selden Rodman's Horace Pippin, A Negro Painter in America (1947), and The New York Times eulogized him as "the most important Negro painter" in American history.From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

The life and work of Horace Pippin

Horace Pippin was born at West Chester, Pennsylvania and raised in Goshen, New York. He left school at 15 and took on a series of dead-end jobs before enlisting in the US Army in 1917. He sustained a serious injury to his arm while serving in France and it wasn’t until 1930 when he was able to use his arm properly in order to paint.

He drew largely from his combat experience as inspiration for his paintings and often worked with religious themes. His work was first exhibited in 1938 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The show was entitled ‘Masters of Popular Painting: Modern Primitives of Europe and America’ and featured many examples of so-called naive art. Pippin’s paintings stood out as being some of the most heart-felt in the exhibition, featuring highly dramatic combat scenes infused with the intense emotions he had experienced first hand.