Thomas Kinkade was an American painter, born in Sacramento, California, in 1958, who died in 2012 at 54. He sold pictures of cottages, lighthouses and village streets by the million, mostly as prints.
He registered the title Painter of Light as a trademark and estimated that his work hung in one of every 20 American homes. Critics have made him their standard example of kitsch, art that is sentimental, mass produced and easy to like.
In a typical Kinkade, a road or a little bridge leads to a cottage whose windows glow with lamplight under a sunset sky. There is almost never a person in the scene, which leaves room for any buyer to feel at home inside.
Selling those pictures became a large business, run through a chain of shops owned by independent dealers. His company was later found to have hidden facts from the people who ran them.
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Kinkade grew up in Placerville, in the Sierra foothills of California, raised by his mother in relative poverty. The streets of that small town later inspired many of his village and snow scenes.
“I was always the kid who could draw,” he said later. Art gave him, in his words, “some kind of dignity” during a difficult home life.
Drawing took him to college, first at Berkeley, then to an art school in Southern California. Before he sold a single print, he walked out of that school with a friend and crossed America on freight trains, a journey that would give him his first book.
What You'll Discover
Who rode the freight trains with him.
What a dab of paint was for.
What the letter N stands for.
What he told his critics.
Who sued the Painter of Light.
What the coroner found.