Benjamin Gross American (1922 - 2006) untitled, ca. 1970-80 oil on canvas Signed verso. Biography from the Archives of AskArt: "Dr. Benjamin L. Gross, (1922-2006) a longtime San Francisco psychiatrist and professor of literature who consulted with Golden Gate Bridge officials about the need for a suicide barrier in the 1960s" looked forward to painting full time after retiring. " A native of San Francisco, he was born in 1922 to Polish Jewish immigrant parents in the Fillmore. He liked to recount how he took sick when he was only 1, and the doctor who came to the house quickly surmised that the family could not afford to pay to have a prescription filled. Instead of making a fuss about it, the doctor slyly left the cash to pay for the medicine underneath the prescription. It was with pride that Dr. Gross worked for 30 years on the faculty in the UCSF psychiatric institute, named Langley Porter after the very doctor who had helped him and his family so many years before. He graduated from Lowell High School in 1938 and got a bachelor's degree in English literature from UC Berkeley in 1942, then a medical degree from UCSF in 1946. After medical school, he worked for two years with the Public Health Service in Europe. His first stint as a medical doctor was in Hamburg, Germany. Dr. Gross also worked in Rotterdam, Netherlands for the Public Health Service. He opened his own practice when he returned to San Francisco and also saw patients at clinics run by the city. He was the psychiatric consultant for San Francisco Suicide Prevention in the late 1960s, training the people who fielded emergency calls. He was one of the first professional psychiatrists to consult with the Golden Gate Bridge district on whether to put up a suicide barrier. Dr. Gross taught a class on literature and psychology at San Francisco State for a decade at the height of student unrest in the 1960s. He taught the same course at the Fromm Institute at USF until the late 1990s. He won the U.S. amateur senior chess championship in 1989 and, naturally, the psychology of chess was one of his favorite teaching topics. He may have been the only professor to ever link chess with the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, according to friends and colleagues." As stated by Peter Fimrite in SFGATE. 26 1/2"H x 21 1/2"W, 28 1/4"H x 23 1/4"W (frame)