Isabel Bishop-She was an American painter and graphic artist, who produced numerous paintings and prints of working women in realistic urban settings. She was widely exhibited in her lifetime, and was recognized with a number of awards including one for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts, presented to her by President Jimmy Carter in 1979. Bishop was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and brought up in Detroit, Michigan, before moving to New York City at the age of 16 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 Kenneth Hayes Miller, from whom she adapted a technique which owed much to baroque Flemish painting. During the early 1920s she also studied and painted in Woodstock, New York. During 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. She returned to the Art Students League as an instructor from 1936 to 1937. In 1940, Bishop was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full member in 1941. Although she never focused on landscape painting per se, many of the remaining early paintings exhibit an interest in natural lighting, trees, still-life, and street scenes, often in a forced 1:3 landscape ratio. Early pieces, of which few survive owing to the artist's intense self-criticism, are often on pressboard. Bishop's mature works depict the inhabitants of New York's Union Square area, where she maintained a studio between 1934 and 1984. Her subjects are nearly always women who come from a blue-collar background, yet she was also known to produce panoramic landscape studies, and social scenes such as golf tournaments. Her portraits are often studies of individual heads (see Laughing Head, 1938, Butler Institute of American Art); the emphasis securely on the subject's expression – or of solitary nudes. Bishop also delighted in multiple-figure compositions, often containing two females engaged in various workaday interactions. In the post-war years Bishop's interest turned to more abstracted scenes of New Yorkers walking and traveling, in the streets or on the subways. Her signature changed many times over her career, ranging from the use of various pseudonyms to initials; some early pieces are signed I.B, or I. Bishop in both block and script. In the mid-1940s, E. P. Dutton commissioned Bishop to illustrate a new edition of Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice. Bishop produced 31 pen-and-ink drawings (the originals are now at the Pierpoint Morgan Library). She died in 1988.
Her obituary-
Isabel Bishop, widely regarded as one of the finest figure painters of modern times and who once described her celebration of the common woman as an effort "to catch the fleeting moment without freezing its flight," has died in New York City where she spent six decades sketching.
She was 85 when she died at her home in the Bronx on Friday.
From the working girls of the Great Depression to the young students strolling in her beloved Union Square, she was praised for extending into modern times the tradition of northern European 17th-Century figure painting.
She cherished that connection and once said that "you may have true gifts and the ability to make something that is new and surprising, but if your work hasn't any connections and your gift gives out, you haven't any leverage."
Although centered in New York throughout her life, her graphic depictions of the comings and goings of working women, "bag" ladies, shoppers and derelicts evolved into a national identity. Miss Bishop's work was first seen on the West Coast in 1985 at a widely heralded exhibit at Loyola Marymount University where William Wilson, The Times art critic, found her oeuvre "a woozy disjunction in time and place. . . . When everything was always gonna be OK because you had a coupla bucks and an American dream. . . . "
Everyday Characters
She came to New York in the early 1920s and studied at the Art Students League with Kenneth Hayes Miller. His devotion to the everyday characters inhabiting the urban sprawl heavily influenced her.
Miller perpetuated modern art, but only as the old masters might have interpreted it. With Miller and Reginald Marsh, one of Miller's best-known students, Miss Bishop toured Europe in 1931 to study the great drawings and paintings there. It was the first of many such trips where she learned the Rembrandt-like naturalness that dominated her works.
She came to be an apostle of the so-called Ashcan School, a group of New York realists whose backgrounds embodied garbage cans, alleyways and back yards. One of her drawings, a 1935 ink wash of a derelict, she titled "The Ash Can."
By the mid-1930s she had become affiliated with the Midtown Gallery, where her one-woman shows had since been seen. She married in 1934 to neurologist Harold G. Wolff, and that and a small inheritance eased her financial plight. She then became free to view the world from her window at Broadway and Union Square, wearing the sneakers and white smock that became her signature.
Her many honors included last year's Gold Medal for Painting from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Her obituary-
Isabel Bishop, widely regarded as one of the finest figure painters of modern times and who once described her celebration of the common woman as an effort "to catch the fleeting moment without freezing its flight," has died in New York City where she spent six decades sketching.
She was 85 when she died at her home in the Bronx on Friday.
From the working girls of the Great Depression to the young students strolling in her beloved Union Square, she was praised for extending into modern times the tradition of northern European 17th-Century figure painting.
She cherished that connection and once said that "you may have true gifts and the ability to make something that is new and surprising, but if your work hasn't any connections and your gift gives out, you haven't any leverage."
Although centered in New York throughout her life, her graphic depictions of the comings and goings of working women, "bag" ladies, shoppers and derelicts evolved into a national identity. Miss Bishop's work was first seen on the West Coast in 1985 at a widely heralded exhibit at Loyola Marymount University where William Wilson, The Times art critic, found her oeuvre "a woozy disjunction in time and place. . . . When everything was always gonna be OK because you had a coupla bucks and an American dream. . . . "
Everyday Characters
She came to New York in the early 1920s and studied at the Art Students League with Kenneth Hayes Miller. His devotion to the everyday characters inhabiting the urban sprawl heavily influenced her.
Miller perpetuated modern art, but only as the old masters might have interpreted it. With Miller and Reginald Marsh, one of Miller's best-known students, Miss Bishop toured Europe in 1931 to study the great drawings and paintings there. It was the first of many such trips where she learned the Rembrandt-like naturalness that dominated her works.
She came to be an apostle of the so-called Ashcan School, a group of New York realists whose backgrounds embodied garbage cans, alleyways and back yards. One of her drawings, a 1935 ink wash of a derelict, she titled "The Ash Can."
By the mid-1930s she had become affiliated with the Midtown Gallery, where her one-woman shows had since been seen. She married in 1934 to neurologist Harold G. Wolff, and that and a small inheritance eased her financial plight. She then became free to view the world from her window at Broadway and Union Square, wearing the sneakers and white smock that became her signature.
Her many honors included last year's Gold Medal for Painting from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Isabel Bishop-She was an American painter and graphic artist, who produced numerous paintings and prints of working women in realistic urban settings. She was widely exhibited in her lifetime, and was recognized with a number of awards including one for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts, presented to her by President Jimmy Carter in 1979. Bishop was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and brought up in Detroit, Michigan, before moving to New York City at the age of 16 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 Kenneth Hayes Miller, from whom she adapted a technique which owed much to baroque Flemish painting. During the early 1920s she also studied and painted in Woodstock, New York. During 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. She returned to the Art Students League as an instructor from 1936 to 1937. In 1940, Bishop was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full member in 1941. Although she never focused on landscape painting per se, many of the remaining early paintings exhibit an interest in natural lighting, trees, still-life, and street scenes, often in a forced 1:3 landscape ratio. Early pieces, of which few survive owing to the artist's intense self-criticism, are often on pressboard. Bishop's mature works depict the inhabitants of New York's Union Square area, where she maintained a studio between 1934 and 1984. Her subjects are nearly always women who come from a blue-collar background, yet she was also known to produce panoramic landscape studies, and social scenes such as golf tournaments. Her portraits are often studies of individual heads (see Laughing Head, 1938, Butler Institute of American Art); the emphasis securely on the subject's expression – or of solitary nudes. Bishop also delighted in multiple-figure compositions, often containing two females engaged in various workaday interactions. In the post-war years Bishop's interest turned to more abstracted scenes of New Yorkers walking and traveling, in the streets or on the subways. Her signature changed many times over her career, ranging from the use of various pseudonyms to initials; some early pieces are signed I.B, or I. Bishop in both block and script. In the mid-1940s, E. P. Dutton commissioned Bishop to illustrate a new edition of Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice. Bishop produced 31 pen-and-ink drawings (the originals are now at the Pierpoint Morgan Library). She died in 1988.
Her obituary-
Isabel Bishop, widely regarded as one of the finest figure painters of modern times and who once described her celebration of the common woman as an effort "to catch the fleeting moment without freezing its flight," has died in New York City where she spent six decades sketching.
She was 85 when she died at her home in the Bronx on Friday.
From the working girls of the Great Depression to the young students strolling in her beloved Union Square, she was praised for extending into modern times the tradition of northern European 17th-Century figure painting.
She cherished that connection and once said that "you may have true gifts and the ability to make something that is new and surprising, but if your work hasn't any connections and your gift gives out, you haven't any leverage."
Although centered in New York throughout her life, her graphic depictions of the comings and goings of working women, "bag" ladies, shoppers and derelicts evolved into a national identity. Miss Bishop's work was first seen on the West Coast in 1985 at a widely heralded exhibit at Loyola Marymount University where William Wilson, The Times art critic, found her oeuvre "a woozy disjunction in time and place. . . . When everything was always gonna be OK because you had a coupla bucks and an American dream. . . . "
Everyday Characters
She came to New York in the early 1920s and studied at the Art Students League with Kenneth Hayes Miller. His devotion to the everyday characters inhabiting the urban sprawl heavily influenced her.
Miller perpetuated modern art, but only as the old masters might have interpreted it. With Miller and Reginald Marsh, one of Miller's best-known students, Miss Bishop toured Europe in 1931 to study the great drawings and paintings there. It was the first of many such trips where she learned the Rembrandt-like naturalness that dominated her works.
She came to be an apostle of the so-called Ashcan School, a group of New York realists whose backgrounds embodied garbage cans, alleyways and back yards. One of her drawings, a 1935 ink wash of a derelict, she titled "The Ash Can."
By the mid-1930s she had become affiliated with the Midtown Gallery, where her one-woman shows had since been seen. She married in 1934 to neurologist Harold G. Wolff, and that and a small inheritance eased her financial plight. She then became free to view the world from her window at Broadway and Union Square, wearing the sneakers and white smock that became her signature.
Her many honors included last year's Gold Medal for Painting from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Her obituary-
Isabel Bishop, widely regarded as one of the finest figure painters of modern times and who once described her celebration of the common woman as an effort "to catch the fleeting moment without freezing its flight," has died in New York City where she spent six decades sketching.
She was 85 when she died at her home in the Bronx on Friday.
From the working girls of the Great Depression to the young students strolling in her beloved Union Square, she was praised for extending into modern times the tradition of northern European 17th-Century figure painting.
She cherished that connection and once said that "you may have true gifts and the ability to make something that is new and surprising, but if your work hasn't any connections and your gift gives out, you haven't any leverage."
Although centered in New York throughout her life, her graphic depictions of the comings and goings of working women, "bag" ladies, shoppers and derelicts evolved into a national identity. Miss Bishop's work was first seen on the West Coast in 1985 at a widely heralded exhibit at Loyola Marymount University where William Wilson, The Times art critic, found her oeuvre "a woozy disjunction in time and place. . . . When everything was always gonna be OK because you had a coupla bucks and an American dream. . . . "
Everyday Characters
She came to New York in the early 1920s and studied at the Art Students League with Kenneth Hayes Miller. His devotion to the everyday characters inhabiting the urban sprawl heavily influenced her.
Miller perpetuated modern art, but only as the old masters might have interpreted it. With Miller and Reginald Marsh, one of Miller's best-known students, Miss Bishop toured Europe in 1931 to study the great drawings and paintings there. It was the first of many such trips where she learned the Rembrandt-like naturalness that dominated her works.
She came to be an apostle of the so-called Ashcan School, a group of New York realists whose backgrounds embodied garbage cans, alleyways and back yards. One of her drawings, a 1935 ink wash of a derelict, she titled "The Ash Can."
By the mid-1930s she had become affiliated with the Midtown Gallery, where her one-woman shows had since been seen. She married in 1934 to neurologist Harold G. Wolff, and that and a small inheritance eased her financial plight. She then became free to view the world from her window at Broadway and Union Square, wearing the sneakers and white smock that became her signature.
Her many honors included last year's Gold Medal for Painting from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
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