Born in Brooklyn, New York, Alexander Brook studied at the Art Students League with Kenneth Hayes Miller from 1914 to 1918. He was a member of the Woodstock artists' colony, with his first wife, Peggy Bacon, from 1920 to 1940. Brook traveled to Savannah in 1938, and spent time between there and New York until 1947. A prominent artist in Savannah during these years, he was hailed by Life magazine in 1940 as "one of America's best painters." Brook maintained a studio in an old warehouse on the riverfront, where he worked as an American scene realist, creating evocative landscapes, portraits, and genre paintings rendered in soft brushwork and muted, somber colors, like this vernacular view of rural Georgia. Brook married the artist, Gina Knee, in 1945 and the couple settled in Sag Harbor, New York. RS

Biography courtesy of The Charleston Renaissance Gallery, www.antiquesandfineart.com/charleston