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George Clair Tooker, Jr. (born August 5, 1920) is one of Magic Realism's most prominent visual artists. He was raised by his Anglo/French-American father George Clair Tooker and English/Spanish-Cuban mother Angela Montejo Roura in Brooklyn Heights and Bellport, NY along with his sister Mary Fancher Tooker. Tooker longed to go to art school rather than college, but ultimately abided by his parents wishes and majored in English Literature at Harvard University, while still devoting much of his time to painting. In 1942, he graduated from college and then entered the Marine Corps but was discharged due to ill-health.
In 1943 he began studying at the Art Students League in New York. Reginald Marsh and Kenneth Hayes Miller were two of his teachers at the ASL. Early in his career Tooker was often compared with other painters such as Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper, and his friends Jared French and Paul Cadmus Working within the then-revitalized tradition of egg tempera, Tooker addressed affecting issues of modern-day alienation with subtly eerie and often visually literal depictions of social withdrawal and isolation. Subway (1950; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) and Government Bureau (1956; Metropolitan Museum of Art) are two of his best-known paintings.
Although he was raised in a religious (Episcopalian) family he later converted to Catholicism. He is a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters and he lives in Vermont.