Alice Neel was born in Merion Square, Pennsylvania, on January 28, 1900, later becoming one of America's foremost portrait painters.
Alice Hartley Neel was born on January 28, 1900, in Merion Square (Gladwyne), Pennsylvania, the fourth of five children of George Washington Neel and Alice Concross Hartley Neel. She grew up in the small town of Colwyn, near Philadelphia, in a middle-class family that valued education but held conventional expectations for women.
Neel would go on to defy those expectations, pursuing an artistic career at a time when women faced significant barriers to professional recognition in the fine arts. Her early exposure to a modest, disciplined household, combined with a keen observational sensibility, informed the psychologically penetrating portraiture for which she later became famous.
Her birth in 1900 places her life almost exactly alongside the twentieth century, and her eighty-four years would span the Great Depression, two World Wars, the rise of Abstract Expressionism, and the feminist art movements of the 1970s—all of which she witnessed and, in her own quiet way, chronicled through unflinching portraits of family members, neighbors, celebrities, and strangers. Her longevity and consistency of vision make her birthdate an important anchor point for understanding twentieth-century American figurative art.
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