Eugene Higgins

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Higgins had little formal training in his youth, though he studied works by Old Masters and contemporary illustrators reproduced in books and magazines. He traveled to Paris, attended the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts, and learned to etch. After his return to the United States, he first gained renown as a printmaker. He painted murals during the early 1930s for post offices in Tennessee and Wisconsin, but kept his studios in New York City and Old Lyme, Connecticut. He exhibited his prints, paintings, and watercolors of farmers and laborers regularly in New York galleries.