Joseph De Martini

Joseph De Martini (1896 -1984) was born in Mobile, Alabama. Being the son of a fisherman, De Martini did not receive any formal education beyond grammar school. Instead, he moved to New York City to study art at the National Academy of Design with Leon Kroll and Ivan Olinsky. He continued his artistic training at the Art Students League.

He worked in the Federal Art Project of the 1930s, and his paintings are in such museums as the Phillips Collection in Washington, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He won a prize from the National Academy of Design in 1950, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1951.

Painting romantic interpretations of daily life, De Martini was interested in both dark theater scenes and scene of coastal New England. A writer for Art Digest critiqued De Martini's rugged seasides in 1942: "With painting -- shadowed sides and strong, dark lines where rocks meet the water -- he can create a pattern of great strength without declaring for abstraction and without losing the romance of place which gives his paintings their greatest appeal."