John Potter Wheat

JOHN POTTER WHEAT (1920 - 1980): John Potter Wheat was an American painter, muralist, watercolorist, and printmaker born in New York City in 1920. He studied at the Art Students League and the Yale School of Fine Arts, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. During World War II, Wheat served as a Corporal in the U.S. Army and worked for the Office of Strategic Services, creating murals and other artwork. His artistic career encompassed watercolor, oil, acrylic, and lithography, and his style evolved from detailed realism toward increasingly expressive and sometimes surreal compositions. He was particularly known for landscapes, New England scenes, barns, churches, and later imaginative figurative and historical subjects. From 1967 to 1968, Wheat served as a combat artist in Vietnam for the Office of the Chief of Military History, producing powerful works based on his firsthand experiences, including , , and . His work is represented in the collection of the New Britain Museum of American Art. Wheat died in 1980 in San Diego de la Unión, Mexico, following a car accident.