Isabel Bishop

1902–1988

An astute observer of urban life, Isabel Bishop was the only female member of the Fourteenth Street School, a group of realist painters who depicted New York during the Great Depression. Like her colleagues Reginald Marsh and Edward Laning, Bishop trained at New York’s Art Students League under painter Kenneth Hayes Miller, who encouraged his students to join classical forms with contemporary subject matter. In her paintings, drawings, and prints, Bishop captured subjects she encountered in and around Union Square, where she rented a studio from 1926 until 1984. She often favored female figures, especially the new generation of office girls who roamed the neighborhood at lunchtime and the matronly shoppers who frequented the area’s thriving department stores. Rather than portraying the chaos and commotion of the city’s crowded streets, as some of her contemporaries did, Bishop focused on intimate moments amid the bustle of daily life.

On the Street includes a group of men—probably drawn from the informal community of unemployed working-class males who congregated in Union Square— that serve as a backdrop for a pair of female shoppers lost in thought as they stride toward the viewer. Bishop described etchings such as this as a means for evaluating whether an image had “a nucleus that you could develop” into a painting. Indeed, Bishop subsequently used On the Street as the basis for an oil painting. This work exemplifies her distinctive use of geometrically balanced compositions and robust, carefully modeled figures to instill ordinary scenes of modern life with grandeur and monumentality.

Wikipedia entry

Introduction

Isabel Bishop (March 3, 1902 – February 19, 1988) was an American painter and graphic artist. Bishop studied under Kenneth Hayes Miller at the Art Students League of New York, where she would later become an instructor. She was most notable for her scenes of everyday life in Manhattan, as a member of the loosely-defined ‘Fourteenth Street School’ of artists, grouped in that precinct. Union Square features prominently in her work, which mainly depicts female figures. Bishop’s paintings won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, among other distinctions.

Wikidata identifier

Q6077568

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Getty record

Country of birth

United States

Roles

Artist, etcher, painter

ULAN identifier

500032484

Names

Isabel Bishop, Harold G. Wolff, Isabel Wolff, Isabel Bishop Wolff, Mrs. Harold G. Wolff, Mrs. Isabel B. Wolff

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Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed April 30, 2025.

On view

First acquired
1932

Date of birth
March 3, 1902

API
artists/122