Barbara Swan

Barbara Swan
Sanary, 1951 (self-portrait of Swan)
Born	1922 Newton, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died	2003 Brighton, Massachusetts, U.S.
Known for	Painting Illustration Lithography
Spouse(s)	Alan Fink

Barbara Swan (1922–2003), also known by her married name, Barbara Swan Fink, was an American painter, illustrator, and lithographer. Her early work is associated with the Boston Expressionist school; later she became known for her still-life paintings in which light is refracted through glass and water, and for her portraits. She is also known for her collaboration with the poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, and for her archived correspondence with various artists and writers.

Barbara Swan was born in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1922. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1943 with a B.A. in art history, then studied painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts until 1948. In her last year at the museum school she was Karl Zerbe's teaching assistant. She spent two years living and working in France on a fellowship from the Museum of Fine Arts, at a time when two-year traveling fellowships were rarely awarded to women. There she met her husband, Alan Fink, whom she married in 1952. Fink later founded the Alpha Gallery on Newbury Street in Boston.

Swan achieved local fame as an artist in the 1950s. Her paintings from this period are loosely associated with the Boston Expressionist school, although her themes tended to be gentler than those of Jack Levine and others working in that style. In a 1957 review of her show at the Boris Mirski Gallery, critic Edgar Driscoll marveled at her ability to render tranquil domestic scenes, featuring sleeping children or nursing infants, in a creative way: "It is a tender, touching showing...Yet the artist, through strong color and off-beat compositions, carefully avoids over-sentimentalizing or slipping into the banal." One of her best known paintings from this period, "Baby", shows her infant son Aaron held up by a man's hand, presumably her husband's.