Wilford Conrow

Wilford Seymour Conrow (1880-1957) was an American artist, most noted for portrait painting. He married Lyra Millette.

Early life

Wildford Conrow was born in

After the war, Conrow returned to New York City, where he lived with his wife above Carnegie Hall and operated a successful portrait studio. During the summers, he resided in Hendersonville, North Carolina. In 1940, during an art exhibition in Asheville, North Carolina, Conrow met artist Paul Whitener. Conrow had never considered himself a teacher, but when Whitener petitioned the portraitist to instruct him, Conrow accepted the promising young artist as his student. The two worked together each summer for the next fourteen years.^[5] During this time, Whitener expressed an interest in establishing an art museum in his hometown of Hickory, North Carolina. As Vice-president of the American Artists Professional League in New York, Conrow was greatly in favor of a museum that would promote American art in the south, and proved to be instrumental in the development of the eventual Hickory Museum of Art. Over the years, he would provide the museum with his knowledge of American art, New York connections, paintings from his private collection, and a large number of his own works.^[4] His portraits are characterized by an intimacy achieved through weeks of time spent with each of his subjects. Beyond physical appearance, he strove to portray character, and becoming acquainted with the subject was consistently part of Conrow's painting process. He is also known for his unconventional use of bold color to enhance flesh tones.^[4] He is included in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Hickory Museum of Art.

References

External links

• Works by or about Wilford Conrow at Internet Archive
• Conrow portrait of Professor William H. Goodyear, 1916, at the Brooklyn Museum