
Petrouchka
Catalogue
- Year
- 1974
- Dimensions
- Image: 92 × 71.8 cm (36 1/4 × 28 5/16 in.); Sheet: 101.5 × 81 cm (40 × 31 15/16 in.)
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Artist
- Robert Gwathmey
Artist

Painting
Robert Gwathmey was an American painter whose social realist works addressed racial injustice and labor conditions in the rural South during the post-war era. Working primarily in oil on canvas, he depicted sharecroppers, cotton fields, and scenes of everyday life with a formal restraint that balanced documentary clarity against compositional sophistication. His figural paintings combined modernist abstraction with figurative narrative, creating a distinctive visual language rooted in 1930s social concern that persisted through the 1980s.
Full artist profile →More
More by Robert Gwathmey
Vendor
1979 · Color screenprint on cream wove paper
Tin of Lard
1969 · Color lithograph on cream wove paper
A Section of Town
1966 · Color lithograph on cream wove paper
Singing and Mending
1946 · Color screenprint on ivory wove paper
The Farmer Wanted a Boy
1942 · Oil on canvas
Land of Cotton
1939 · Watercolor and gouache, with pen and black ink, and touches of scraping, over traces of graphite on ivory wood pulp laminate board (illustration board)
Record
Verified by WattsOS- Artist
- Robert Gwathmey
- Year
- 1974
- Dimensions
- Image: 92 × 71.8 cm (36 1/4 × 28 5/16 in.); Sheet: 101.5 × 81 cm (40 × 31 15/16 in.)
- Watts ID
- WW-1974-132886
Source
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Source
- aic
- Reference
- View at source
- Status
- verified





