About the artist:

Born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, William Bailey became a painter in styles ranging from abstraction to super-real. He earned his B.F.A. and M.F.A. at Yale University and studied with Josef Albers. From 1962 to 1969, he taught at Indiana University, and starting in 1969 he was a professor of art at Yale University. William Bailey loved the past, and he repeatedly looked at the classics of European painting, such as  “Basket of Fruit” by Caravaggio at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, and the hieratic still-lifes by Zurbaran are often cited in this connection. They are certainly a point of reference in his wide search for a formal vocabulary, together with others in Mediterranean culture. Bailey’s still-lifes (so often with suggestive Italian titles) are distinct domestic objects arranged frontally on top of a table that coincides with the line of the horizon. They stand against a barely modulated background with the studied conventional equilibrium of sculpture on the pediment of a Greek temple or the sacrality of objects set out on an altar. William Bailey was a Professor of Art Emeritus at Yale University. He served as a member of The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a Member of the Board, Smithsonian Archives of American Art from 2000 to his death. He was a trustee for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation from 1970 to his death. Bailey had an extensive exhibition history, and his works appear in numerous public and private collections including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; among many others. William Bailey passed away in Connecticut in April of 2020. Browse our selection of Willaim Bailey’s signed prints and posters.