Three Share-Croppers

A native of Richmond, Virginia, Robert Gwathmey's early experience in the South would have a profound and lasting effect on his painting. Gwathmey studied one year, at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, before continuing at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. He settled in New York in the early 1940s, and taught at Cooper Union, Beaver College, Glenside, Pennsylvania, and at Carnegie Technical Institute, Pittsburgh.

Gwathmey was a fervent social activist in both his life and in his art. As one of his colleagues at Cooper Union noted, "He taught ethics and morality, not only in art, but that they were not disconnected from the society in which you lived." He worked to establish artists' rights, was a member of Artists Equity, and as a result of his outspoken commitment to social and racial equality, he was placed under surveillance by the F.B.I. for 27 years beginning in 1942.

Often drawing on his Southern heritage for specific subject matter, he presented images of laboring whites and blacks in no demeaning way, but instead rendering them with sincere sympathy and dignity. "Three Share-Croppers" illustrates Gwathmey's characteristic faceted and colorful style. A consummate humanist, the artist often noted that his principal concerns were the human figure and more importantly the human condition.