Francis de Lancey Cunningham Jr.[1] (born 1931) is an American figurative painter known for working across three genres – nude, landscape and still-life—and for being an influential teacher.

[3][4] Born in New York City in 1931, Francis Cunningham grew up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where at the age of 16 he caught the attention of artist Ben Shahn.

After two years as a lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps, he attended the Art Students League of New York (1955–1959), where he studied drawing and anatomy with Robert Beverly Hale and painting with Edwin Dickinson.

[10] Of his participation in an exhibition of four major American realist painters at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1999, Angela Levine wrote, "Francis Cunningham's oils are so delicately executed that they have the appearance of watercolors in the wet-on-wet technique, so that one color merges with the next.

None of his scenes are identifiable, being all made up of fragments of buildings and sky, foliage and sea which Cunningham brings together in exceptionally lyrical compositions".

His Sunday high school scholarship class at BMAS came to be known for its nontraditional methods of figurative painting, observing directly from nature using a plumb-line and finder, and putting down on the flat surface of the canvas abstracted color-value notes.