Thomas Kinkade, 1958–2012

Thomas Kinkade’s art career was unlike any other. Inspired by his mother’s collection of Norman Rockwell covers from The Saturday Evening Post, he created an empire of sentimental, bucolic art so vast that his paintings were said to hang in one out of 20 American households. “It was almost as if God became my art agent,” he once said. “He basically gave me ideas.”

Kinkade was born to a single mother and raised in poverty in Placerville, Calif., said The New York Times. He was consumed with art from an early age, and as a young man crossed the country in a boxcar with another artist “to sketch the American landscapes they encountered.” He studied art briefly at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., but dropped out to paint sets in Hollywood.

After he became a born-again Christian, in the 1980s, Kinkade and his wife, Nanette, poured all their savings into starting a printmaking business, said the Los Angeles Times. The investment paid off in “astonishing commercial success.” Kinkade’s luminous seascapes, light-flooded glens, and comforting country churches “translated to more than $50 million in earnings for the artist from 1997 to 2005 alone.” He set up his own network of galleries in shopping malls throughout the country, and licensed his images for “air fresheners, night-lights, teddy bears, toys, pillows, and La-Z-Boy loungers.” As a self-styled “painter of light,” he became an inspirational speaker and even designed gated communities—with $425,000 homes—that aimed to embody the spirit of his paintings.

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Critics were rarely impressed. “Schlocky” was the judgment from Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight, and California writer Joan Didion once wrote that Kinkade’s images had “such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister.” His personal life had its dark sides too, said the San Jose Mercury News. In 2010 his company filed for bankruptcy protection, and the same year he was arrested for drunken driving. But none of that has dented the unparalleled popularity of Kinkade’s paintings. “It is clear,” he once wrote, “that everyday people need an art they can enjoy, believe in, and understand.”