About the Artist

John Court is unique among contemporary figurative painters in the consistency of his commitment to advancing the traditions of the Old Masters. He is, the esteemed art critic Frank Getlein once mused, “one of that unnumbered minority of contemporary artists intimately familiar with art before Picasso.”

Familiar with it, indeed. In fact, he is a standard bearer for it. Among the great American painters, he is perhaps most appropriately grouped with Thomas Eakins and John Singer Sargent. He is a great portraitist who can—and does—paint whatever else he chooses. Landscapes, maritime paintings and equine images are all frequent subjects.

Born in 1948 in Annapolis, Maryland, it was clear from an early age Court would be an extraordinary painter. From the beginning, he worked hard to cultivate his prodigious natural talent. But he took a different path than the one traditionally taken by developing artists. He turned down a scholarship to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, opting instead for simultaneous immersion in studio work and the humanities at Cornell University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts in 1970 and a master’s degree in fine arts in 1972.

Court developed a point of view—and set out to answer a calling—that ran distinctly against the grain in an art world where abstract expressionism had long since become the mainstream. He first gained national recognition in a 1981 American Artist Magazine cover story in which art professor Jon Longacre observed an “unshakable conviction that what he is doing—continuing the Renaissance and Baroque tradition in art—is in the mainstream of Western art.” But Court does not paint in the tradition of the Old Masters merely to honor some long past, static ideal; he works to advance that tradition.

The degree to which he has been able to accomplish that mission is perhaps most striking in the portrait of a modern public figure such as Barry Goldwater, whose life and career has held a prominent place in post-World War II America’s collective consciousness. Court’s technical prowess is readily apparent in the painting, which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery’s permanent collection, but he achieves more than just a likeness; he evokes Goldwater’s vision and spirit.

Court’s own vision—of art, and of the world—is a romantic one. But, as Getlein explains: “It is only against the background of a classical education that Court’s definition of himself as a romantic painter can be properly understood.... His methods and techniques are those of the Old Masters as developed from Giotto and Duccio through Rubens and Rembrandt and modified by himself. He understands and respects his materials. He commands and employs plane and recession, linear and aerial perspective, foreshortening and elongation, the whole classical bag of tricks invented or reinvented by the Renaissance. But he does so, especially in the landscapes, for his own, essentially romantic purposes, purposes having to do with different times of day from the Renaissance high noon, with puzzling, sometimes disturbing questions rarely raised in the Renaissance—although Rembrandt was quite familiar with them—questions about what was best named by a fairly low-level romantic, Victor Herbert, as the ‘sweet mystery of life.’”

In addition to The National Portrait Gallery, Court´s work hangs in the permanent collections of The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, The Phoenix Museum of Art, the Hermitage Museum in Norfolk, Virginia, and the Machado Museum in Portugal, as well as numerous, corporate, municipal, university and private collections throughout the United States, Europe and Asia.

Court now lives and works in the Portuguese Azorean Islands, traveling extensively for portrait sittings. To inquire about commissioning a portrait or landscape, see Court’s price list and contact information.

Praise for John Court from Thomas M. Messer, Director Emeritus, Guggenheim Museum of Art