George Quaintance (1903-1957)
“HOME ON THE FARM”
Signed “Geo. Quaintance 1925” lower right,
oil on canvas 38 x 50 inches.
$35,000 USD
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“I paint the world I see while overshadowing and overlaying it with my emotions, my beliefs, and my culture.”
-George Quaintance
Biography:
In his fifty-five years, George Quaintance made a significant eclectic impact on a multitude of aspects of American culture. He was born June 3, 1902 in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, as the only son of a farming family. His parents allowed him to develop his artistic potential and supplied him with paint, brushes and fine art training.
Quaintance moved to New York at the age of 18 to study at the prestigious Art Students' League. While there, he also began the study of classical and jazz dancing, tap, and tango and briefly appeared with an acclaimed and widely traveled vaudeville dance troupe. Using a pseudonym, he also drew pin-up girls for many movie magazines. By 1925, he turned his attention again to painting and produced introspective landscapes, among other subjects. In the 1930’s, his art started to attract people’s attention. In this decade, he involved himself with photography, magazine editing, interior decorating, stage design, and hair design, with clients such as Marlene Dietrich, Jeanette McDonald, and Helen Hayes. He also painted portraits of notable people, including foreign diplomats, Washington politicians, society wives, and movie stars. By 1937, he was the highest paid illustrator for Gay French Magazine, earning more than fifty thousand dollars a year.
About 1947, he moved to Los Angeles and painted and photographed many handsome young men for physique and bodybuilding magazines. In the early 1950s he moved to a ranch in Phoenix where he loved the cowboy image so much he adopted it himself, wearing tight Levi’s and western shirts with exotic boots. Quaintance, an artist who drove himself to create and to make his work financially successful, died of a heart attack at age 55 on November 8, 1957.
Today, the work of George Quaintance is difficult to find and his original paintings are rare and so highly desired that they generally pass from collector to collector without ever being offered on public art markets.
Information contained in this biographical sketch is from copyrighted research material collected by John Waybright and Ken Furtado, who are co-authoring a comprehensive George Quaintance biography. Reprinting without permission is illegal. The authors may be contacted at waybrightj@comcast.net or ken_furtado@earthlink.net