Horace Cayton (1903-1970) was a sociologist, educator, author and columnist. He is most well known as the co-author (with St. Clair Drake) of Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, a history of Chicago’s South Side from the 1840s to 1930s. The book was groundbreaking when it was published in 1945 and remains a landmark study of race and the urban experience. Cayton moved to New York from Chicago in 1949, the year this portrait was painted. [http://arthistorynewsreport.blogspot.nl/2017/07/alice-neel-uptown.html] ...Formulas based on traditional academic teaching informed most art school curricula, including that of the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art and Design) where Neel studied in the 1920s. These formulas were designed to render white European faces, and account for the artist’s early reliance on tenebrism. It seems obvious strolling in the gallery from one canvas to the other that the Neel behind Horace Clayton, 1949 is not the same Neel behind Kanuthia, 1973. By studying the human race as it actually looks, Alice Neel prepared the contemporary portrait painter for a world still emerging into the light 30 years after her death. (https://hamptonsarthub.com/2017/03/27/reviews-art-review-alice-neel-portraits-explore-the-true-colors-of-the-human-race/)