In 1939, Ben Solowey (1900-1978) was asked about the influences upon his work. "Looking back to early days in art school call to mind a strong influence upon me of the French," said Solowey. "They through Delacroix, Courbet, the Impressionists and the Moderns, injected fresh air into painting."

Born in Warsaw in 1900, Ben Solowey moved with his family to Russia in 1907, before emigrating to Philadelphia in 1914. In 1920, recognizing Solowey’s evident talent, Edward Redfield awarded the young artist a three-year scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. At the Academy, Solowey found a near perfect mix of the modern and the classical in his education. During this formative period of his life, he was trained in the rigorous classical training that the Academy had been teaching since its founding as one of the oldest art schools in the country. Yet among his teachers were artists that were the vanguard of Philadelphia’s progressive society. Hugh Breckenridge and Henry McCarter, encouraged individual expression in their students. Arthur B. Carles, the city’s modernist spokesman, also felt the same. They worked tirelessly to bring their students and the city into a modernist world through teaching, exhibitions, and various performances. The trio, along with others, was responsible for mounting a number of influential Modernist exhibitions at the school during Solowey’s time there, and the young artist was no doubt influenced by the exposure.

Solowey solidified his interest in Modernism during a trip to Europe in 1924. There he spent months in Paris, the center of the art world, and soaked up the influences of the French painters he admired. Solowey returned to Philadelphia for a short period before moving to Manhattan in 1928, then the epicenter of American modernism.

Solowey routinely exhibited his paintings in national and international exhibitions alongside those of Matisse, Picasso, de Kooning, and other legends at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Academy of Design and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

At the height of his substantial acclaim, Solowey left the comforts of Fifth Avenue for the countryside of Bucks County. Here he would create some of his greatest work, even though the first seven years would be without electricity and running water on his property. He restored the 1765 farmhouse on the 34-acre farm, furnishing it with his own recreations of classic furniture he admired in museums. He transformed the barn into a spacious studio which stands today filled with his artwork, a testament of his phenomenal talent. A true Renaissance Man, he produced award-winning canvases and sculptures while handling everything from cabinetmaking to plumbing, from masonry to gardening.

Solowey's mastery of many styles, genres, and media has drawn comparisons to John Singer Sargent, William Merrit Chase, Hirschfeld, Daniel Garber, and Arthur B. Carles, but his work is uniquely his own. His paintings radiate a calm and luxurious world that soothes and pleases a viewer, yet his art was rooted in his direct observation of the environment around him. Solowey offers us the luxury of contemplating a private paradise, a place of pleasurable ease and harmony that he has fashioned from an extraordinary life