Medium: oil on canvas
Size: 24" x 36"
Frame: 35" x 47"
Condition: overall great condition
Circa: 1950-1969
Provenance: Private estate sale of PA.

Artist: Albert Ernest (Beanie) Backus (1906 - 1990)

Albert Ernest (Beanie) Backus was active/lived in Florida. Albert Backus is known for Everglade landscape, trees and figure painting.

The Backus studio in Fort Pierce became a gathering place for aspiring artists and also for friends seeking stimulating conversation, for Haitian refugees, troubled local kids whom he housed, and for bus-loads of tourists. He hated "pleasant" conversation, stating that "I'd rather be a liar than a bore". (Backus Museum). Reportedly he could hold forth on almost any topic ranging from personal finance, through politics, philanthropy and religion. He spoke of the virtues of Christianity but alternated between atheism and agnosticism. He was known for his annual Halloween parties, always integrated by race and age, and ever featuring the recent artwork of his students known as the Backus Brats.

In those years, his lifestyle was a combination of personal creativity, gregariousness and modest day-to-day existence with old appliances, and only one air conditioned room, his studio where he most likely was playing recorded music of Duke Ellington. Backus donated generously to charities and paid for the academic art education of numerous young people he thought deserving.

Of this ever-outreaching man and much-admired artist, Unitarian minister, Charles Lelly, wrote in 1969: "Here is a man who gives of himself, of his time, and of his love. He gives to the rich, to the poor, and to the in-between. He takes in the destitute or homeless and takes care of their needs until they are able to stand alone. He never knows whether another man is white, black, yellow or red. He only knows that man is a person. He has the courage to be firm when necessary, yet is always tender...understands and loves, but rarely passes judgment...puts himself last and everyone else ahead." (Backus Gallery)

Albert Ernest Backus died at age eighty four of heart failure on June 6, 1990. His studio, at the corner of Avenue C and Second Street in Fort Pierce, is maintained as the Backus Gallery where the doors to his "gabled house with the turquoise shutters are wide open, a sure sign that the artist is in residence. . . .On a typical day, you could find the man with the shock of silver hair and the guyabera shirts in one of three places: In the kitchen cooking; sitting on a wrought-iron chaise lounge reading the paper; or standing at his easel, preserving Florida's vanishing beauty on canvas (Backus Museum)

His work can be found in the LBJ Texas library, the rooms of the Georgia State Supreme Court and the A.E. "Bean" Backus Gallery and Museum in Fort Pierce, Florida, which is the location of his studio and much of his collection of paintings and original sketches including the earliest known work, painted in 1918 and the unfinished painting on his easel at the time of his death. Also at the Backus Gallery and Museum is a collection of work by The Highwaymen.

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