Edward Henry Potthast

Edward Henry Potthast was an American Impressionist painter in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although he was born in Ohio and studied painting in Europe, he lived in New York from age 38 to his death at 70 in 1927. Potthast is best known for his paintings of leisurely life at New York’s and New England’s beaches and in Central Park. Images of leisure coincide with Potthast’s carefree, loose brushstrokes, and his subject matter indicates New York’s middle and upper–middle class just before the Great Depression.