Happy birthday to artist Guy Pène du Bois, born on this day in 1884.Guy Pène du Bois made his artistic debut at the 1905 Paris Salon, but was forced to return to New York in 1906 following the death of his father.
Birthday Guy
Happy birthday to artist Guy Pène du Bois, born on this day in 1884.Guy Pène du Bois made his artistic debut at the 1905 Paris Salon, but was forced to return to New York in 1906 following the death of his father.
He took a job at the New York American, the newspaper that had employed his father, and over the next fifteen years worked as both a painter and a writer.
By the 1920s, Pène du Bois the painter was well known for wry depictions of what he called the "symbols of sophistication." His paintings of affluent society at the race track, in night clubs, and at other leisure moments are stylized, the subjects' blank expressions almost caricatures.
Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg. Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (exhibition text, National Museum of American Art, 1987).
Pictured: Guy Pène du Bois, 1884–1958, Shovel Hats, 1923, oil on plywood, 10 x 14 3/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation.