Henry Schwartz, who was born in Winthrop, Massachusetts in 1927, is arguably the most important of the second generation of Boston Expressionist painters, those who succeeded and studied with the great post-World War II figures Hyman Bloom, Jack Levine, and Karl Zerbe. Those figures had the greatest influence on Schwartz during his years at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts from 1948 through 1953.

Schwartz produced a large and philosophically ambitious body of work of great painterly invention and dash. His two primary forms have been, first, narrative history paintings and portraits in which figures from cultural and political history are arrayed and examined; and second, autobiographical works examining his own, personal world. At times, these strains have merged.

Schwartz's exhibitions career is marked by his 1991 retrospective at the Fuller Museum of Art, in Brockton, Massachusetts, which brought together four decades worth of paintings. His work can be found in the collections of the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and the Boston Public Library, among others.

View Boston Globe obituary, March 15, 2009