A. E. Backus
He was named after a family friend, Albert Hoofnagle, and the doctor who delivered him as a baby and cared for him when he became critically ill, Dr. Ernest E. Van Landingham.
[4][5] Because Backus was sickly as a toddler (he was diagnosed with bronchial pneumonia and peritonitis), his mother gifted him a small set of watercolor paints for him to occupy his time so that he wouldn't expend too much of his energy.
The theatre also had shows by renowned Hollywood stars like Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Sally Rand, and Robert Taylor, for whom Backus would use pastels to create portraits on velour paper adhered to wallboard to promote their guest appearances.
[10] In 1938, after Backus left the Sunrise Theatre, he opened a studio with Don Blanding in the Arcade Building of downtown Fort Pierce.
[13] He painted vivid Florida landscapes, including beautiful sunsets, beach and river scenes, and the spectacular vistas of the Everglades.
[14] Beginning in 1942, he began his service as quartermaster, third class, aboard the troop carrier USS Hermitage, where his routine task was correcting nautical charts.
[16] The skipper of the USS Hermitage, Captain Rockwell Townsend, was an amateur sculptor and befriended Backus as a fellow artist.
He painted in both watercolor and oils the scenes of the South Pacific, the California coast, and the European ports he visited.
[18] After WWII, Backus returned home to Fort Pierce and bought his father's boat shop on Moore's Creek, which he turned into an art studio.
For example, Backus was commissioned in 1948 to paint murals for the West Side State Bank in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
A great deal of misinformation circulates as to Backus's role in the creation of the outsider art, a phenomenon referred to as the Highwaymen.
[26] Alfred Hair, one of the driving forces behind the loosely allied group of African-American artists and the inspiration to create hastily rendered images of a fantasized Florida, was briefly a student of Backus.
Because of his open-door policy and willingness to engage with any interested individual, there are no extant records of his work as a teacher or a comprehensive list of his students.
