Virginia Snedeker was a member of the American Scene movement, a group of painters of the 1920s through the 1940s who rejected avant garde modernism and chose instead to embrace social realism and the depiction of everyday life. Ms. Snedeker focused her attention on life in New York, producing paintings and drawings in addition to illustrations and covers for The New Yorker. ...Born in New York in 1909, Ms. Snedeker studied drawing and painting at the National Academy of Design and later at the Art Students League. She was influenced by Kenneth Hayes Miller, a classical realist painter and a teacher at the Art Students League. By the mid-1930s, under Mr. Miller’s tutelage, she was making cheerful oil paintings of New York street vendors, children at play and the sidewalk interaction of neighbors. ....After World War II, everything changed for the artist. She married and soon afterward moved from New York to Ridgefield, where she stopped painting to raise two children. For a time, she also worked in a factory to help support her family. This spelled an end to her short but promising career, which art historians and curators are only now beginning to piece together. This exhibition is an important first step. (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/24artsnj.html?_r=0) In addition to her painting, Snedeker worked as illustrator. Her first cover for the The New Yorker magazine, 1939, shows a bohemian-looking man and woman carrying a large painting through the streets of New York. It's fascinating to me that it appears to have been assumed that the artist of the couple was the man, whereas Snedecker, the painter, may have been quietly referring to herself. In any case, the cover was a hit, and its success gained Snedecker a coveted contract with the New Yorker. She did covers as well as numerous black and white spot illustrations for that magazine. (http://womenintheactofpainting.blogspot.nl/2013_02_01_archive.html) undefined

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