Robert Gwathmey was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1903. His mother supported his family by teaching. He worked his way through high school and art school in Philadelphia and became a painter and art teacher. He helped establish an artist’s union and became involved with politics and racial issues. When visiting the South, the harsh treatment black people received and the “acute blind spots of my boyhood friends and associates” shocked him. Every summer he returned, and in 1944 he lived on a tobacco farm working with black sharecroppers. Gwathmey’s own experiences led him to make paintings that would identify the racism he saw in America. He died in New York in 1988.