Horace Pippin
| Horace Pippin | |
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| Born |
Horace Pippin February 22, 1888 West Chester, Pennsylvania |
| Died | July 6, 1946 (aged 58) |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Painting |
 9 paintings, Metropolitan Museum of Art |
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Interior, 1944, National Gallery of Art |
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2015 exhibition of Horace Pippin's works, Brandywine Museum |
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Gallery of Horace Pippin Artwork
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Horace Pippin (February 22, 1888 – July 6, 1946) was a self-taught African-American painter. The injustice of slavery and American segregation figure prominently in many of his works.
A Pennsylvania State historical Marker was placed at 327 Gay St., West Chester, Pennsylvania to commemorate his accomplishments and mark his home where he lived at the time of his death.
He was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Goshen, New York. There he attended segregated schools until he was 15, when he went to work to support his ailing mother. As a boy, Horace responded to an art supply company's advertising contest and won his first set of crayons and a box of watercolors. As a youngster, Pippin made drawings of racehorses and jockeys from Goshen's celebrated racetrack. Prior to 1917, Pippin variously toiled in a coal yard, in an iron foundry, as a hotel porter and as a used-clothing peddler. He was a member of St. John's African Union Methodist Protestant Church.
Pippin served in the 369th infantry, the famous Harlem Hellfighters, in Europe during World War I, where he lost the use of his right arm after being shot by a sniper. He said of his combat experience:
I did not care what or where I went. I asked God to help me, and he did so. And that is the way I came through that terrible and Hellish place. For the whole entire battlefield was hell, so it was no place for any human being to be.
While in the trenches, Pippin kept an illustrated journal which gave an account of his military service.
Three Soldiers on March
Soldiers with Gas Masks in Trench
Pippin initially took up art in the 1920s to strengthen his wounded right arm; his activity as a painter began in earnest around 1930, when he completed his first oil painting, The End of the War: Starting Home. By the late 1930s, critic Christian Brinton, artists N. C. Wyeth and John McCoy, collector Albert C. Barnes, dealer Robert Carlen and curators Dorothy Miller and Holger Cahill championed Pippin's distinctive paintings that captured his childhood memories and war experiences, scenes of everyday life, landscapes, portraits, biblical subjects, and American historical events. Pippin enrolled in art classes at the Barnes Foundation during autumn 1939 and spring 1940 semesters.
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Wikipedia