"Naughty Children" on Canvas by Harold Stephenson, Aka Abruzzi

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This painting features two children with big brown eyes peeking behind red-slatted shutters. The innocence on their faces contrasts with … Read more This painting features two children with big brown eyes peeking behind red-slatted shutters. The innocence on their faces contrasts with some sense of embarrassment, like if they had done something naughty they wanted to hide.

Harold Stephenson, also known as Abruzzi, was a California painter known for his formal portraits of Hollywood notables and later as a painter of stylized scenes of children and post-Atomic ruins in the early 1960s.

Stephenson was born in Bellefontaine, Ohio, in 1907, and he left Ohio as a young man to study at the Art Student's League and the National Academy of Design in New York and later at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
During World War II, Stephenson was a combat artist with the United States Army. He painted on Guadalcanal in 1942 and during some of the other island campaigns. Some of his work reflecting his memories of WW2. resides in the Pentagon and the United States Army Collection.

After the War, Stephenson settled in Hollywood, where he worked for the studios and painted portraits for the Hollywood elite. In the early 1960s, he began painting a series of paintings of waif-like children among fanciful ruins, reflecting his anxiety over nuclear war. These scenes of children were very successful and were published as popular prints. Stephenson was also active as a teacher, opening his Benedict Canyon Studio for students several days a week. In recent years his work has been re-discovered by young rock and roll musicians who are ardently collecting the art and furniture of the early 1960s. See less