Henry Billings

For the American politician, see Henry M. Billings.

Henry Billings
Born	July 13, 1901 Bronxville, New York
Died	October 1985 Sag Harbor, New York
Nationality	United States

Henry Billings was a 20th-century American artist. He was a painter, illustrator, muralist, and art instructor active in New York City. He was a grandson of John Shaw Billings, a surgeon and the first director of the New York Public Library.

Life and work

Billings attended St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire. He also studied at the Art Students League of New York, and was a member of the Art Colony of Woodstock, New York.

His painting style shows an interest in the mechanical and machinery, as well as an attraction to surrealism.

During the New Deal, Billings created a number of murals on commissions overseen by the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture (later, the Section of Fine Arts). In 1936-37, he created a series of five murals depicting winter sports for the Lake Placid, New York post office. He also contributed murals to post offices in Medford, Massachusetts, Wappinger Falls, New York, and Columbia, Tennessee, and a striking mural of a panther which still hangs near the ladies' powder room in Radio City Music Hall at Rockefeller Center.

In 1945, Billings created a series of paintings for LIFE magazine depicting "strafing targets as they appear to the fighter pilot through the transparent rectangle of his reflector gunsight."

Billings died in Sag Harbor, New York, in October 1985.

Selected works

Paintings

• "White Boats," circa 1929

Public art

• "Panther Mural," 1932, Radio City Music Hall, Rockefeller Center
• "Maury County Landscape," 1942, Post Office of Columbia, Tennessee

External links

• Henry Billings letters and photographs, 1955, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
• Oral history interview with Henry Billings, 1964 Nov. 25, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution