American painter Theophilus Brown was BOTD in 1919. Born in Moline, Illinois to a prominent intellectual family, he showed an early talent for art and music. He attended Yale University with the intention of studying art; unimpressed by the university’s “prehistoric” painting department, he switched to music. After graduating in 1941, he was drafted into the Army during World War Two. Following his discharge, he began to study painting, living between New York City and Paris. He met many of the key figures of the post-war avant garde, including the artists Pablo Picasso, George Braques, Alberto Giacometti, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning, and the composers John Cage, Francis Poulenc, Samuel Barber and Igor Stravinsky. His early paintings were heavily influenced by Cubism, though moved towards figurative work in the early 1950s, gaining acclaim when three of his homoerotic paintings of football players were featured in Life magazine. In 1952 Brown moved to California to attend the graduate art programme at the University of California, Berkeley, associating with a group of artists who became known as the Bay Area Figurative Movement. At Berkeley, he met fellow student Paul Wonner, who became his life partner. In 1962, they moved to Santa Monica, where Wonner began teaching at the University of California. They developed a mostly queer friendship circle, including May Sarton, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, William Inge and the New Zealand writer Janet Frame. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Brown remained committed to portraiture, placing his subjects in arcadian landscapes. By the late 1960s, his painting became flatter and more descriptive in appearance. Later in life, he experimented with collage, and created a series of drawings of male nudes. After Wonner’s death in 2008, he moved into the opulent San Francisco Towers, which he christened the “Versailles of retirement communities”. He continued painting and taking art lessons until his death in 2012, aged 92. His work is displayed in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.