David Gilmour Blythe

Raised in a log cabin on the banks of the Ohio River, David Gilmour Blythe was almost entirely self-taught; aside from an apprenticeship with a Pittsburgh woodcarver, he is not known to have had any formal artistic training. Inspired by the gritty working-class subjects of 17th-century Dutch genre painting, Blythe satirized the political and social corruption that characterized American urban life. He also traveled Ohio and Pennsylvania as an itinerant portrait painter.