Eugene Montgomery

Who was Eugene Montgomery?

Eugene Montgomery, a painter and illustrator, was born in Texas in 1905 and died in Aurora, Illinois on December 16, 2001 of complications from a broken hip.

Montgomery moved to Chicago in the 1920s to study at the Art Institute of Chicago. He began his career in advertising and his first commercial work, a sketch of his daughter, was bought by the Carnation Milk Co. and used on their magazine advertisements.

Montgomery continued to do commercial illustration for many years, and worked in many genres, but gained most of his recognition as a portrait painter and a muralist. Montgomery was a prolific portrait painter and often used his family as models. He was hired to paint numerous corporation chairpersons and executives, or those being recognized by companies, such as G.E. vacuum tube pioneer Saul Dushman. He was commissioned by Sears Roebuck to paint a series of portraits of its founders and officers, and many of his portraits still are displayed in the Sears Tower in Chicago. Montgomery painted similar portraits for companies such as Allstate and Motorola, and for heads of hospitals and universities. Montgomery's most famous and most widely-viewed portrait is probably that which he was commissioned to do of University of Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne in the 1930s. The portrait remains in the University collection in South Bend, Indiana. Montgomery also painted anonymous portraits, such as Woman with Mandolin, which hangs prominently in the guest house of Oprah Winfrey. Another notable work, a portrait of Motorola founder Paul Galvin, hangs today in the Crerar Library of the Illinois Institute of Technology.