A Passion for the Arts in St. Louis

(November 18, 1872 – April 20, 1935) Da Loria Norman was an American artist. Norman was noted for painting and for her illumination of books and images, and partnered with leading English artists such as Walter Crane. One of her most significant commissions was the illumination of “Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon“, a Ballantyne Press vellum edition designed by Charles…

(17 November 1503 – 23 November 1572) Agnolo di Cosimo, usually known as Bronzino or Agnolo Bronzino, was an Italian Mannerist painter from Florence. His sobriquet, Bronzino, may refer to his relatively dark skin or reddish hair. He lived all his life in Florence, and from his late 30s was kept busy as the court painter of Cosimo I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. He was mainly…

(November 16, 1904 – July 16, 1971) Alice Trumbull Mason became a staunch advocate of nonobjective art early in her career, and throughout her life she believed in its truthfulness over representational art. Born to an affluent family in Litchfield, Connecticut, Mason was a descendant of the American painter John Trumbull. Her mother had studied…

(November 15, 1920 – December 25, 2021) Wayne Thiebaud was an American painter known for his colorful works depicting commonplace objects—pies, lipsticks, paint cans, ice cream cones, pastries, and hot dogs—as well as for his landscapes and figure paintings. Thiebaud is associated with the pop art movement because of his interest in objects of mass culture, although his early works,…

(14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) Claude Monet was a French painter and founder of impressionist painting who is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it. During his long career, he was the most consistent and prolific practitioner of impressionism’s philosophy of expressing one’s perceptions before nature, especially…

(November 13, 1898 – June 3, 1969) George Snow Hill was a painter and sculptor in the United States known as a muralist. He lived in St. Petersburg, Florida until his death in 1969. He founded the Hill School of Art in St. Petersburg in 1946. Hill was born in Munising, Michigan in 1898. He studied naval engineering and architecture at Lehigh University from 1917 until 1918, before…

(November 12, 1823 – April 14, 1903) Thomas Waterman Wood was an American painter born in Montpelier, Vermont. Thomas Waterman Wood’s father, John Wood, came to Montpelier from Lebanon, New Hampshire in 1814. The Wood family was of Puritan descent, and it was from Lebanon that John Wood, the father of the artist, married his wife Mary Waterman. John Wood…

(11 November 1863 – 15 August 1935) Paul Signac was a French painter who, with Georges Seurat, developed the technique called pointillism. When he was 18, Signac gave up the study of architecture for painting and, through Armand Guillaumin, became a convert to the colouristic principles of Impressionism. In 1884 Signac helped found the Salon des Indépendants. There he met Seurat, whom he initiated…

(10 November 1880 – 21 August 1959) Sir Jacob Epstein KBE (10 November 1880 – 21 August 1959) was an American-British sculptor who helped pioneer modern sculpture. He was born in the United States, and moved to Europe in 1902, becoming a British subject in 1910. Early in his career, in 1912, The Pall Mall Gazette described Epstein as “a Sculptor…

(November 9, 1924 – September 9, 2019) Robert Frank was a Swiss American photographer and documentary filmmaker. His most notable work, the 1958 book titled The Americans, earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and nuanced outsider’s view of American society. Critic Sean O’Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said The Americans “changed the nature of photography, what it could say and…