Horace Pippin was born in West Chester, PA on Feb. 22, 1888 and died on July 6, 1946. He was a major black American artist. He painted places he knew, as in the illustrations for a diary he kept as a soldier in World War I, and those he imagined, as in the scenes from the last raid, trial, and death of John Brown at Harpers Ferry, such as John Brown Going to His Hanging (1942; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia). Pippin, who also painted landscapes and religious subjects, used large areas of flat color and infused them with emotional intensity. His style, generally termed naive rather than primitive, recalls at times that of Henri Rousseau.