Thomas Cornell (American, 1937-2012)
Dedicated to nature and beauty, Cornell worked in a broad range of techniques and media, including oil paintings, prints and sculpture. Landscapes, animals, activist issues, and people frequently appear in his artworks. In Portrait of Degas, Cornell etches finely, with large spaces left blank. The face of the artist is rendered realistically, with close-knit hatching and cross hatching used on his collar. This differentiates the texture of skin from that of clothes, in which the artist used a few confident lines for the contour of the coat.
Born in Cleveland, Cornell received his undergraduate degree at Amherst College in 1959 and later studied at the Yale School of Art and Architecture. After accepting a position in 1962, he was a professor in visual arts at Bowdoin College in Brunswick until his retirement in 2012. His work has been featured in nearly 20 solo exhibitions and five dozen group exhibitions, including the first group exhibition of American art shown in the Soviet Union, in 1989. He received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the Fulbright Grant, the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Fellowship, and the Ford Foundation Grant. His work is collected throughout the nation including at the Cleveland Museum of Art; Harvard University; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; the New York Public Library; and the University of Northern California.
