Charles Rain Oil on Panel “Italian Garden” 1960

Charles Rain Oil on Panel “Italian Garden” 1960
Biography
Charles Whedon Rain was born in 1911 in Knoxville, Tennessee.[2] He grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska and studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1931-1933, with fellow Nebraskan artist and friend Keith Martin.[3] Rain would follow his studies with a year-long trip to Europe in 1934, where he traveled to Berlin, Paris, and Vienna, meeting several artists there, including Max Beckmann and Otto Dix.[3] Rain returned to the United States in 1935, settling in New York.[3]

Charles Rain was a prominent member of the Magic Realists, a movement of American painters influenced by European trompe l’oeil and Surrealism.[1] A 1942 exhibition by the Museum of Modern Art titled American Realists and Magic Realists featured paintings by Charles Rain, amongst other artists such as Andrew Wyeth and Peter Blume.[4] Rain also created costume designs for a ballet performed by the School of American Ballet. He died in New York in 1985.[2]