Self-Portrait II

After World War I, Pippin, who had no formal art training, wrote and illustrated memoirs of his combat experience where he lost the full use of his arm. By the 1930s he was burning designs into wood panels and making paintings that found a ready audience in an art world then keen on self-taught painters. By his death in 1946, he had mounted solo shows in Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, won prizes in important contemporary art annuals; garnered attention in the national and international press; and sold most of his 130 or so paintings, wood panels, and drawings to museums and influential collectors across the country. This tiny self-portrait is part of a group of eight of his works donated by Jane Kendall Gingrich, one of the socially prominent women on Philadelphia’s Main Line with whom the artist cultivated patronage relationships.