George Tooker was born in Brooklyn in 1920 and was raised there until he was seven years old when his family moved to Bellport, Long Island. Tooker’s work was influenced by his friend, Paul Cadmus, and his teacher, Reginald Marsh, both of whom painted with egg tempera. Tooker is associated with the social realism and surrealism genres, and is best known for his anxiety-ridden paintings of urban life in New York, such as The Subway (The Whitney Museum). While Tooker’s work was overshadowed by the mid-century interest in abstract expressionism, critical interest has returned to this master of otherworldly realism.

When the Brooklyn native moved to Long Island, he began taking painting lessons from the landscape and genre painter, Malcolm Fraser. Tooker attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he focused on watercolors and landscape drawings. He continued painting watercolor landscapes after admittance to Harvard in 1938, where Tooker also became captivated with social justice for homosexuals and people living in poverty. After graduation, Tooker enrolled at the Art Students League, where he studied under Marsh, the social realist Harry Sternberg, and Kenneth Hayes Miller, who was also one of Edward Hopper’s teachers. By 1946, Tooker was achieving success with his eerie urban scenes, which comprised his mature and most well-known work. Yet, Tooker still had to make custom furniture to supplement painting sales in order to make a living. He lived the later part of his life teaching at the Art Students League in New York, and traveling between his homes in Malaga, Spain and Hartland, Vermont, where he lived in isolation with his life partner. After his partner died in 1973, Tooker began painting happier, more religious themes. Shortly before his death in 2009, Tooker received the National Medal of the Arts, a deserved award for one of the most distinctive and mysterious American painters of the 20th century.