COAL ELEVATORS watercolor

Audio Book (DVD). Fine. Harry Matthew Kidd (1899-1964) was an American modernist painter. This painting titled "Coal Elevators" is Art Deco in style, and recalls the period in which the artist lived in Pennsylvania, a coal mining state. One of Harry Kidd's paintings was included in the 1929 watercolor exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. A native of Detroit, Kidd attended public schools in El Paso, Texas before moving to Germantown, Pennsylvania, where in 1914 he was attending high school at the outbreak of World War I. He enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and served in England where he reportedly painted the portrait of General Hugh Montague Trenchard, afterward marshal of the Royal Air Force, Viscount Trenchard. After the war, Kidd returned to the United States to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. An Academy scholarship enabled him to study and travel in Europe, including a period on Majorca (1927-29). He returned to El Paso in 1933 for health reasons; in the 1940s he moved to Key West, Florida and then in 1964, to Tucson, Arizona. He died in Tucson the same year. A specialist in social realism, he painted on occasion along the Rio Grande. His portraits, genre works, and city scenes frequently depicted Mexican people and topics. His writings appeared in the El Paso Herald-Post. Kidd was a colossal egoist, sure of himself as a creative artist, unsure of his own definition of his subject matter, a slave to good design, but a modernist of courage and stature. Source: John and Deborah Powers, Texas Painters, Sculptors & Graphic Artists. Please view the photographs. DIMENSIONS: 18" X 11.5" (image)