Horace Pippin (February 22, 1888 – July 6, 1946) was an American painter who painted a range of themes, including scenes inspired by his service in World War I, landscapes, portraits, and biblical subjects.

[7] As a boy, Horace responded to an art supply company's advertising contest and won his first set of crayons and a box of watercolors.

[1][6] In World War I, Pippin served in K Company, the 3rd Battalion of the 369th infantry regiment, known for their bravery in battle as the famous Harlem Hellfighters.

(Presumably, mischaracterizations of that quote and a photo shoot from December 1940, illustrated above, are the sources of the erroneous, widespread idea that he had to move his right hand with his left to paint.

[5] Brinton immediately organized a solo exhibition, cosponsored by the CCAA and the interracial West Chester Community Center, and then connected him with MoMA curators Dorothy Miller and Holger Cahill and, by 1940, the Philadelphia art dealer Robert Carlen and collector Albert C. Barnes.

In the eight years between his national debut in the Museum of Modern Art's traveling exhibition "Masters of Popular Painting" (1938) and his death at the age of fifty-eight, Pippin's recognition grew exponentially across the country and internationally.

[5] In the catalogue for one of his memorial exhibitions in 1947, critic Alain Locke described Pippin as "a real and rare genius, combining folk quality with artistic maturity so uniquely as almost to defy classification."

His first oil painting, The Ending of the War, Starting Home (1930–1933), depicts a scene informed by his experience at the Battle of Sechault, where he was shot.

Pippin painted several religious subjects, which align with his roles as a Sunday school teacher and member of a church choir in West Chester.

In The Knowledge of God and The Holy Mountain III, the tiny brown figure hanging in the trees refers to the ongoing scourge of lynching in the racially segregated southern United States.

Lastly, The Holy Mountain III is marked "Aug 9, 1945", the day the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan.

[6] As he did with other aspects of Pippin's career, his dealer Robert Carlen took credit for exposing the artist to Hicks' series as he was a principal advocate for both autodidacts.

His painting of John Brown Going to his Hanging (1942) is in the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia is part of a trilogy on the abolitionist sometimes credited with igniting the Civil War.

The relatively small image—about the size of a magazine cover—sorts the figures by race and scale around the central motif of a giant V that matches the typography used in support of the US war effort.

[18] The lower register is filled with smaller scale figures that are segregated by race, reflecting the contemporaneous situation in the military and, to a lesser degree, the war industries.

A similar group of White men fill the lower right quadrant, most turned to face their Black counterparts.Pippin's genre paintings are among his most popular works; see, for example, the Domino Players (1943), in The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., and several versions of Cabin in the Cotton.

[5] He made two portraits of the celebrated Black contralto Marian Anderson, not long after her famous 1939 concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and dedicated a painting to Paul Robeson.

Romare Bearden later said: "the man, I think, symbolizes Pippin himself, who, having completed his journey and his mission, sits wistfully, in the autumn of the year, all alone on a park bench.