Thomas Kinkade

1958 - 2012

William Thomas Kinkade, III grew up in Placerville, California in relative poverty, raised by a single mother. “His mother did her best to raise three kids, but he still always longed for the home that had the lights on, all the fireplaces lit—for a warm, homey feel,” said Denise Sanders, who worked with Kinkade the last 15 years of his life.

As a child, Thom liked to draw comics and caricatures. As luck would have it, when Thom was in high school, Glenn Wessels, a retired University of California professor and artist moved in next door, and when Thom asked if he could apprentice with Wessels, he agreed. At Wessels’ urging, Kinkade attended the University of California, Berkeley for two years before transferring to the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. However, soon after transferring to the Art Center, Kinkade left the school to paint backgrounds for Fire and Ice, a 1983 animated film.

Kinkade and his friend James Gurney, who would later become known for his children’s book Dinotopia, spent the summer of 1980 hopping freight trains, eking out a living sketching portraits. They ended up in New York City with an idea for a book on sketching, which they convinced Guptill Publications to produce. The Artist's Guide to Sketching was one of Guptill Publications' best-sellers in 1982.

Kinkade moved back to California, became a born-again Christian, got married, and began painting in the style that would bring him fame and fortune. By 1984 Kinkade was selling limited-edition prints of his paintings in front of a local grocery store for $55.

In 1989 Kinkade’s Yosemite Valley, Late Afternoon Light at Artist’s Point was named the official print of the National Parks System. To date, Thomas Kinkade is the only American artist to win two Founder's Awards from the National Parks Academy for the Arts. By the late 1990s, Kinkade began franchising the distribution of his limited-edition prints to galleries in malls and shopping centers across the country. At its peak, Kinkade’s art reportedly generated $130 million in sales through some 350 franchises. Kinkade attributed his success to the broad appeal of his subjects. “It’s not the world we live in,” said Kinkade, “It’s the world we wished we live in. People wish they could find that stream, that cabin in the woods.”

In order to meet the demand and add value to his limited-edition prints, Kinkade employed studio artists to touch up prints with actual brush strokes. "There's been million-seller books and million-seller CDs," said Kinkade. "But there hasn't been, until now, million-seller art. We have found a way to bring to millions of people, an art that they can understand." This approach, and Kinkade’s saccharine color palate and choice of subjects for his mass-produced prints, made him a very controversial artist among critics. As art critic Jerry Saltz observed, “art is not democratic. It isn’t about the biggest market share. If that were true then Thomas Kinkade would be the greatest artist who ever lived.” To the critics who considered his art and method of production irrelevant, Kinkade’s reply was, “My art is relevant because it’s relevant to 10 million people. That makes me the most relevant artist in this culture, not the least. Because I’m relevant to real people.”

Sadly, the problems that plagued Kinkade in his later life resulted in his premature death in 2012 from an accidental overdose of alcohol and Valium. That year his company reportedly generated more than $4 billion in revenue.

The Kinkade painting in this collection is from his earliest years as an artist and is rare in that Kinkade produced very few paintings that could be genuinely considered part of the Western genre.

CAMPFIRE AT DUSK Oil on Canvas Board 1982 14 ¼ x 24 ½ inches