David Gilmour Blythe

David Gilmour Blythe painted America with a satirist’s eye. His small genre pictures show ragged street boys playing marbles, smoking and picking pockets, lawyers and politicians caught in their own vanity, and crowded scenes full of caricatured faces, all in a dark, earthy palette.

Born in East Liverpool, Ohio, in 1815, he was largely self-taught. He was apprenticed to a woodcarver and worked as a portrait painter and poet before finding his real subject, and he settled in Pittsburgh around 1860. During the Civil War he painted strongly pro-Union pictures such as Lincoln Crushing the Dragon of Rebellion (1862). Forgotten after his death in 1865, he was rediscovered in the 1940s and is now seen as the Pittsburgh region’s leading painter of the 19th century, with works in the Metropolitan Museum and the Carnegie Museum of Art.

Art Versus Law and Boy Playing Marbles show both his humour and his edge.