Isabel Bishop

Isabel Bishop
Isabel Bishop, 1959 - Photograph from the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
Born	(1902-03-03)March 3, 1902 Cincinnati, Ohio,
Died	February 19, 1988(1988-02-19) (aged 85)
Nationality	American
Education	New York School of Applied Design for Women
Known for	Painting, graphic design

Isabel Bishop (March 3, 1902 – February 19, 1988) was an American painter and graphic artist who depicted urban scenes of Union Square, New York, from the 1930s to the 1970s. She is best known for her depiction of American women and as a leading member of the Fourteenth Street School of artists.

Bishop was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her parents were descended from old, wealthy and highly educated East Coast mercantile families. Her father was a scholar of Greek and Latin, and her mother was an aspiring writer as well as an early activist for women's suffrage. After the family relocated to Detroit, Bishop began her art education at the age of 12 in a Saturday morning life drawing class at the John Wicker Art School in Detroit. Upon graduating from high school, Bishop moved to New York to pursue a career as a graphic artist.

At the age of 16 she moved to New York City to study illustration at the New York School of Applied Design for Women. After two years there she shifted from illustration to painting, and attended the Art Students League for four years until 1924. It was there that she studied with Guy Pène du Bois and with Kenneth Hayes Miller, from whom she adapted a technique which owed much to baroque Flemish painting. In addition, she learned from other early modernists including Max Weber and Robert Henri. During the early 1920s she also studied and painted in Woodstock, New York.

Through the 1920s and 1930s she developed a realist style of painting, primarily depicting women in their daily routine on the streets of Manhattan. Her work was greatly influenced by Peter Paul Rubens and other Dutch and Flemish painters that she had discovered during trips to Europe. In 1932, Bishop began showing her work frequently at the newly opened Midtown Galleries, where her work would be represented throughout her career.

In 1934, Bishop married Dr. Harold G. Wolff, a neurologist, and moved to Riverdale New York. However, she continued to work in a loft studio near Union Square at 9 West Fourteenth St, which she continued to use until 1984. She became interested in the interaction of form and ground and the mobility of everyday life, what she called "unfixity", life and movement captured on canvas. Her style is noted for its sensitive modeling of form and "a submarine pearliness and density of atmosphere". During this time, Bishop began working in various printing techniques, most notably aquatint.