Al Pounders’s first job after graduate school at Cornell University was teaching painting and art history at Peabody College at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, from 1959 to 1966. He was an early member of the Nashville Artist Guild, whose membership over the years has included visual artists Red Grooms, Philip Perkins, Sylvia Hyman, Louise LeQuire and Alan LeQuire. A native of Buffalo, New York, Pounders left Nashville to teach at Purdue University in Indiana, where he ultimately retired. His work, represented by Allan Stone Gallery in New York City, includes a series of Italian landscapes painted during frequent travels to Umbria over three decades. The portrait featured here is part of a series of paintings of old men, made during his time in Nashville.