American Painter Guy Pène du Bois (1884–1958) ~ Blog of an Art Admirer

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American Painter Guy Pène du Bois (1884–1958)

The American painter, Guy Pène du Bois was born in Brooklyn to a French family. He studied at the New York School of Art under William Merrit Chase and Robert Henri, his fellow-students were Edward Hopper and George Bellows. He also studied and lived in Paris.
Upon his return from Europe, the artist plunged into the whirl of life and it became the basis of his painting.

Guy Pène du Bois, Sunday Walkers

In 1940, he published his autobiography: Artists Say the Silliest Things. He mentioned there that "...William Merrit Chase, a glittering personality with a pointed gray beard and a handlebar mustache... could paint a life-size full-length portrait in only three hours, and he finished his most famous still life pictures so rapidly that the fish used in them, borrowed from a nearby market, were returned still fresh." In Paris, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the founder of the Whitney Museum, commissioned a portrait from her friend Pene du Bois when she discovered that he couldn't afford the outfit he needed to escort her to the opera.
His son was the French-American author and illustrator William Pène du Bois.(Wikipedia)