Oil/paper mounted on board, signed, professionally cleaned, framed - 18"x22".
 
Higgins (1874-1958) was born in Kansas City, Missouri to an Irish stonecutter and raised in St. Louis, where he attended the St. Louis School of Fine Arts. He later went to Paris in 1897 and studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian under Jean-Paul Laurens, Benjamin Contrast and Jean Leon Gerome. While in Paris he learned etching, which would become his primary way of earning money. He returned to the US in 1904, ultimately settling in NYC. He was a member of the National Academy of Design, and during the Depression he painted murals for post offices throughout the country. He worked in the tradition of Jean-François Milet and Honoré Daumier. Through his work, Higigins often expressed his humanitarian interests in portrayals of the poor and downtrodden, homeless, derelicts and discards of society. A critic once opined that Higgins could create "a despondent mountain and a grieving road." His works can be found in the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among many others.