Thomas Kinkade was an American painter, born in Sacramento in 1958, who died in 2012 at 54. He trademarked the title Painter of Light and sold glowing cottages, lighthouses and village streets by the million, mostly as prints. He estimated that his work hung in one of every 20 American homes, and critics have held him up ever since as the definition of kitsch.
He painted lit windows and almost never a person, so the buyer could move in. The company that sold those pictures was later found to have hidden facts from the dealers who sold them.
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Kinkade built his name on one promise, that his pictures held light. Windows glow, lamps burn and dusk skies seem lit from behind, and he had the phrase Painter of Light trademarked so that no one else could use it. He painted cottages, churches and rivers, and he rarely put people in them. In 2001 he told The New York Times, “I view art as an inspirational tool.”
At its height the business behind the pictures sold through about 350 Signature Galleries, and opening one cost upwards of $50,000. In 1999 a couple in Charlottesville, Karen Hazlewood and Jeffrey Spinello, put in $122,000 to open theirs. They said they had been promised a faith based partnership, a business that was blessed.
In February 2006 an arbitration panel ruled, two votes to one, that the company and one of its executives had hidden facts that would have kept the couple from investing. It awarded them $860,000. The panel did not name Kinkade himself. Six years later the Painter of Light was dead at his home, and the coroner gave the cause: alcohol and Valium.
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.