John Koch, born in Toledo, Ohio in 1909, was an American realist best known for his paintings of fashionable Manhattan and New England mansion dwellers. Koch's early art training was minimal. He attended two summers at the artists' colony at Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he was influenced by the work and theory of Charles Hawthorne.

After graduating from high school, he went to Paris, where he stayed for four years painting on his own, never under a teacher. As he later recalled, "the Louvre taught me my major lessons." At a time when the world seemed to turn its back on the realist tradition, Koch persisted and presented intimate views of his personal world.

His paintings are populated with models, musicians, views of his studio, and his own elegant fourteen-room apartment facing Central Park West in New York City. In defense of his seemingly "upper-crust" subject matter, Koch once stated, "I have great affection for ... dishonored subject matter ... [because of] the arbitrary ... way in which it has been dismissed. Have (sic) the sensuous, the lyrical elements really been expelled from modern life? Of course not; is modern man exclusively occupied with his own tragic plight, his neuroses, and his destruction? This ... is as much the sentimentality of our day as was the sweetness and light for which we so tirelessly berate the Victorians."

Although Koch is generally viewed as a painter of the rich and famous, he was not just a superficial 'society painter'; as Koch himself stated, "I am quite visibly a realist, occupied essentially with human beings, the environments they create, and their relationships."

His style is akin to the work of the seventeenth-century Dutch master Jan Vermeer, evoking quiet, intimate interiors, and creating luminous effects by under painting in egg tempera and glazing with oils. Koch's compositions were elegant. His warm tones and colors invited you into his world where, as you investigate the contents, you discover treasures amongst his beautifully observed subjects.

Member:
National Academy of Design, NYC
Audubon Artists Century Association
Lotus Club Royal Society of Art (Benjamin Franklin Fellow)

Public Collections:
Art Institute of Chicago
Art Students League, NYC
Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH
Detroit Institute of Arts
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
Museum of Modern Art, NYC
National Academy of Design, NYC
Toledo Museum of Art, OH