Autumn

Born and raised in Charlotte, Eugene Thomason received a business education at Davidson College and was honorably discharged from the Navy before he began to pursue art. Once he returned to Charlotte, he painted a portrait of tobacco and electric power industrialist James B. Duke. This success garnered a sponsorship for enrollment at the Art Students League in New York, where he fell in with the dark, gritty style of the Ashcan School. He earned a reputation for using thick, chaotic brush strokes to depict the hardworking people at home and those he saw while abroad in Ireland.

Thomason would return to Charlotte in the 1930s and then to rural Nebo, North Carolina, in 1939. For the next ten years, he painted the people and landscapes of the Appalachian foothills. By depicting subjects such as the fictional “Hankins Family” in unique, vibrant Regionalist compositions, he became known as the “Ashcan Artist of Appalachia.”