George Biddle

1885-1973

George Biddle, sculptor, painter and graphic artist and illustrator was born in Philadelphia in 1885. Biddle's early academic schooling was "constantly at war with natural creative instincts, and was possibly the cause for his two early breakdowns, at sixteen, and again at twenty-three." Biddle got an A.B. and LL.D. degree from Harvard and at the time accepted that he, like other Biddle's before him would follow in the tradition of the famous Biddle family of lawyers. He passed the state bar exams at the age of twenty-six, and at the very same time, much to the chagrin of his family, "at last determined to become a painter" the war within was over.

He studied in Paris, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (two years) and Munich. Biddle also studied with Ole Nordmark. He stated "I gobbled up museums, French impressionism, cubism, futurism, the Old Masters; I copied Valequez in Madrid, Rubens in Munich; I fell under the spell of Mary Cassatt's' passion and integrity, and through her eyes I was influenced by Degas. I was desperately in earnest to overcome my late start."

The onset of the World War, in which Biddle served for two years, was another setback the artist had to overcome for he was already thirty-four and still a student. Undeterred Biddle turned at first to Europe then the tropics for inspiration and spent two years in Polynesia toiling with failed attempts at expressionistic painting. He then went to Paris to further experiment with stone and wood, and modeled in clay. He cut block prints and made designs for marquetry, embroidery, stitch work and pottery.

Of those years that he regarded as unhappy, he wrote in his autobiography: "I began to feel how different from our own is the French mentality; and I realized how actually different in motivation and content is our own best American art." He returned to America in 1922 at the age of thirty-seven. In the early summer of 1930, he traveled to Charleston, South Carolina and made ink and watercolor sketches that he later transformed into oil paintings and lithographs.

During the mid thirties Biddle settled in Croton-on-Hudson with his second wife where he remained for the rest of his life. Biddle used his friendship with Franklin Roosevelt to initiate the ambitious Federal Art Project, later known as the W.P.A., that employed artists of all sorts. Biddle completed murals for the New Brunswick, NJ, post office; Department of Justice Building in Washington, D.C. and others.

Biddle known as a social-realist painter who captured scenes from everyday life also employed this subject matter in his murals for the Department of Justice, painting "the underprivileged poor." In the same work on another panel Biddle then "shows the same family transported to a better life in the suburbs." It is the American dream realized. This sentiment for America was captured further when Biddle stated "I for one would be deeply unhappy anywhere else. But this goes not to the essence. Of course an American, if he be one, will create best in terms of his America. But as an artist, I must probe and know my own depths and then I can express not only my America but the world's life which is in each of us."

Biddle's work expressed not only "his America" but demonstrated a greater more worldly sensitivity in his art in that his subject matter drew universal appreciation. He was also known for landscapes, cities, soldiers, mules, clowns, still lifes, flowers and nudes.

He wrote an autobiography, An American Artist's Story. He also wrote and illustrated with fifty drawings a book, Green Island in 1930, and published articles in Scribner's Creative Arts, American Magazine of Art, Parnassus and The Arts.