- Thomas McKnight
Thomas McKnight (born 1941) is an US artist.
He was born in 1941 in
Lawrence, Kansas . At sixteen, the designer and art director ofHarper's Bazaar , Alexey Brodovitch, told him that he "had it" and could succeed as an artist.fact|date=April 2007 He attendedWesleyan University , a small liberal arts college inMiddletown, Connecticut , where he was one of only five art majors. He spent his junior year in Paris. After a year of graduate work in art history atColumbia University , in 1964 McKnight found a job atTime Magazine where he would work for eight years, interrupted by a two year stint in the army in Korea.In 1972 McKnight left Time, summered on the Greek island of
Mykonos , and commenced painting in earnest. In 1979 in Mykonos, McKnight met Renate, a vacationing Austrian student, and married the following year.Throughout the 1980s McKnight’s art, mainly limited edition serigraph prints, became increasingly popular.
In 1994 he was commissioned by the White House to paint the first of three images for President Clinton’s official Christmas card. One of these, "White House Red Room", was used as the cover of a
Lands' End catalog, which sold both the art and the original as one of the Christmas gift items. McKnight’s work is represented in the permanent collection of New York’sMetropolitan Museum of Art , as well as in theSmithsonian Institution . McKnight and his wife live in the village ofLitchfield, Connecticut .
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