Regionalist artists
depicted an optimistically envisioned American landscape, as
well as the loneliness of anonymous big city life, with broad
brush strokes and a heavy palette. Although younger than most
of the Regionalists of the 1930s and 1940s, Wallace Smith
appropriated both their vision and style of painting. He found
inspiration in the people, folkways, and myths of country life.
Born in St. Louis,
Missouri, Smith studied architecture at Princeton University and
at the Ecolé des Beaux-Arts in Paris before turning to painting.
He studied painting in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and exhibited
with the American Watercolor Society in New York, working with
Peggy Bacon, his mentor, as well as with Walt Kuhn, Raphael Soyer,
and Edward Hopper. He also studied with Thomas Hart Benton at the
Art Students League and exhibited in group shows at the Museum of
Modern Art.
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