Victor Joseph Gatto (USA,1890-1965), "Water Buffalo and Snake in Jungle, #52", oil on canvas. Size: 17" x 24" , 44 x 61 cm (stretcher), 19.5" x 26.5" , 50 x 68 cm (frame).

Victor Joseph Gatto (1893–1965) was born in New York City, and he had served in the US Navy and boxed as a featherweight long before he turned his mind or hand to painting. In 1938, out of work due to an injury, he came across a sidewalk art show in Greenwich Village, and seeing the prices that even amateur paintings commanded, decided to take it up. This decision luckily coincided with a swell of interest in the “naïve” style of art, and his work received interest from galleries, museums, and celebrities. Painters Elaine and Willem De Kooning, who lived in the apartment next door to Gatto and his widowed stepmother, were among the many artists who encouraged him to continue. Gatto painted using finely-haired brushes, continually layering pigment to achieve endless and exacting detail. His paintings are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of American Folk Art, all in New York, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC, amongst many others.