Everett Raymond Kinstler

United States of America (USA), 1926

BiographyEVERETT RAYMOND KINSTLER was born in N.Y.C. and began his career at age 16 drawing comic books: Zorro, Hawkman,The Shadow, work that influenced the pop art school. He created covers for books and produced hundreds of magazine, pulp and book illustrations.

Kinstler made the transition to portraitist and soon established himself as one of the nation’s foremost portrait painters.

Among Kinstler’s more than 500 portraits are such well known personalities as Tony Bennett, Carol Burnett, Peter O'Toole, James Cagney, Betty Ford, Gene Hackman, Katharine Hepburn, Lady Bird Johnson, Paul Newman, Gregory Peck, John Wayne; Astronauts Alan Shepard and Scott Carpenter; Supreme Court Justices Harry Blackmun and Ruth Bader Ginsburg; Writers Tennessee Williams and Tom Wolfe; Sports figures Arthur Ashe and Byron Nelson; six U.S. Governors; four U.S. Secretaries of State; and the presidents of colleges and universities, including Brown, Harvard, Princeton, Smith, Wellesley, Williams, and Yale.

Five Presidents have posed for him: Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. His portraits of Ford and Reagan are the official White House portraits. Kinstler has painted more than 50 U.S. cabinet officers, more than any artist in the country’s history.

He has been awarded two honorary doctorates, by Rollins College in 1983 and the Lyme Academy College of Art in 2002. The National Portrait Gallery, Wash.,D.C., has acquired more than 50 of his works for its permanent collection. He is represented in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, The Butler Institute of American Art, among others. In 1999, Kinstler received the Copley Medal from the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the highest award the gallery bestows on a portrait artist.

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