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Alton Tobey (American, 20th century) painting, "The Birds". Sales in the mid thousands. Measures 48" x 32" on Masonite. Signed an titled on verse and front. VERY RARE. Tremendous opportunity. He was born in Middletown, Connecticut, and in 1934 won a scholarship to the Yale University School of Fine Arts. After his military service, he completed his masters degree at Yale and taught there for a period. Alton Stanley Tobey resided for most of his life in the village of Larchmont, part of the town of Mamaroneck in Westchester County, New York. He was married to Roslyn Tobey, an esteemed piano teacher and musician. Their son, David Tobey, is a painter and musician. Alton Tobey died on January 4, 2005 at a nursing home in Mamaroneck, New York. The New York Times obituary, by Wolfgang Saxon, described Alton Tobey as "a muralist, portraitist, and illustrator whose renderings of famous events and faces hang in museums, libraries, public buildings, corporate offices, and private collections. "Tobey is ranked by the Artists Trade Union of Russia amongst the world-best artists of the last four centuries". Referring to the dichotomy between his realist works and his curvilinear and other modernist works, Alton Tobey once said, "I live an artistic double life: one of classical realism and the other of aesthetic exploration." Tobey's murals, illustrations, and portraits show him working in the realistic style for which he is best known. The huge murals on historical subjects (first painted in the 1930s, when he worked for the WPA Federal Art Project) are probably the most widely seen of Tobey's works, prominently displayed in many public places in the US and elsewhere. These include public institutions in his native Connecticut; the Smithsonian Institution and other venues in Washington, DC; New York's Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum; and even an officers club in Saudi Arabia. Indeed, the Larchmont Gazette obituary (see 'External links') states, "Alton Tobey was best known for the murals, which he called 'symphonies of painting'." Alton Tobey was president of the National Society of Mural Painters from 1984 to 1988. In his work as a frequently commissioned portraitist, Tobey had the honor of rendering many prominent sitters in paint. These included Pope John Paul II, the poet Robert Frost, and Albert Einstein. In fact, it was while Einstein was sitting for his Tobey portrait (during the 1940s), that a cordial acquaintance began which yielded an important gem of artistic inspiration: Einstein's remark that there are really no straight lines in nature led to Alton Tobey's invention of his signature "curvilinear" style - one of his experimental genres.
