Alice Neel first met John Rothschild (1900–1975), a Harvard-educated businessman, at the Washington Square Park annual outdoor exhibition in 1932. Neel later described him as a ‘great companion’ and they remained loyal friends until his death in 1975 (in fact from 1970 until his death Rothschild lived in Neel’s spare room). Over the decades Neel completed a number of works depicting Rothschild, including the celebrated watercolours Untitled (Alice Neel and John Rothschild in the Bathroom), and Alienation, both completed in 1935 – works remarkable for the candour of their confessional intimacy yet which also suggest, as Neel later said, that their lives were more compatible ‘across the dinner table’ than in the bedroom. John with Bowl of Fruit, 1949, which depicts Rothschild alone smoking a pipe, his face half in shadow and eyes downcast, has an air of calm as well as contemplation that seems to speak to the ease of friendship.

Alice Neel was born near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1900 and died in 1984 in New York. Renowned for her paintings of friends, family, acquaintances, fellow artists and critics, Neel was among the most important American artists of her time.

The ambitious survey Alice Neel: People Come First, which ran from March to August 2021 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, will open at the Guggenheim Bilbao this autumn (17 September 2021–6 February 2022). Alice Neel: Un regard engage, the Centre Pompidou’s major retrospective highlighting the political and social commitment of the painter, will open in Paris in October 2022.

Neel’s work is in the collections of major museums including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; the Denver Art Museum; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Tate, UK, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.