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Eugene Higgins
American, 1874-1958
Eugene Higgins was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1874. He began drawing at an early age but had very little formal training. His parents were Irish immigrants and his mother died when he was four years old. Eugene and his father lived in boarding houses in St. Louis. Many years later Higgins acknowledged that the earliest influence on the development of his artistic style was Michelangelo, whose works his father, a stonecutter, deeply admired and taught him to appreciate. Another early influence was the art of Millet, whose illustrations he discovered at age twelve in a copy of St. Nicholas magazine.
The environment in which he grew up. St. Louis, Missouri, was the scene of yearly floods, bringing every form of human misery and often tragedy. What Higgins witnessed, experienced, and heard made an indelible impression and formed the basis of his artistic expression. From the very start and consistently throughout his life, he was the artist of the poor, the lonely, and the down-trodden, portraying them in the drama of their human existence but always with understanding, compassion, and Christian resignation. Higgins traveled to Paris to broaden his knowledge and further his experience in art, he was relatively unaffected by the new art movements that were emerging at that time. Instead, true to his background and predilection, he sought inspiration in the companionship of the "poor" of Paris. In France, he studied at the Academe Julian and at the Ecoles des Beaux - Arts and learned the art of etching and monotype. When he returned to America he first gained recognition as a printmaker. In 1932-1933 he executed two murals representing the movement West for post offices in Tennessee and Wisconsin. Higgins maintained studios in New York City and in Lyme, Connecticut, where he continued to portray laborers and peasants. He was elected a full member of the prestigious National Academy of Design and later became a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
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