About the artist:

John Koch was an American painter and teacher, and an important figure in 20th century Realism. He is best known for his light-filled paintings of urban interiors, often featuring classical allusions, many set in his own Manhattan apartment.

His work is in the collections of prominent American museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and many others.

He was born in Toledo, Ohio, to Marian Joan and Edward John Koch, and grew up mostly in Ann Arbor, Michigan. During his high school years he spent two summers at an artists' colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He moved to New York City in 1928, where he met and became friends with Dora Zaslavsky, a talented piano teacher, four years his senior. He moved to Paris, where he spent five years studying on his own, copying paintings at the Louvre and other museums, and supporting himself by painting portraits.

He returned to New York City in 1934, where Zaslavsky was teaching at the Manhattan School of Music and waiting for her divorce to be finalized. They were married on December 23, 1935. The Koch marriage was childless, which may have been a cause of regret—his 1955 painting Father and Son depicts him turning from his easel to see himself as a boy lying on the floor and sketching.

Koch was drafted into the US Army in 1943, but wound up doing alternative service in New York veterans hospitals. He taught at the Art Students League of New York, 1944–1946. After World War II he became a featured artist at Portraits Incorporated, which managed commissions and charged up to $10,000 for a group portrait by him.

In 1953, John and Dora Koch bought a 14-room apartment on the tenth floor of The El Dorado, a building at 300 Central Park West. They soon bought an adjacent apartment for Dora's piano studio. After the death of Koch's mother, his father came to live with them, and appeared in individual portraits and some of the group portraits.

Koch suffered a stroke in 1975, that paralyzed his right hand and forced him into a wheelchair. He recovered some use of his hand, but died following another stroke in 1978.

"I am quite visibly a Realist, occupied essentially with human beings, the environments they create, and their relationships." — John Koch