One of the greatest chroniclers of twentieth-century America, Alice Neel was born in a small town near Philadelphia in 1900, but made her mark as a “painter of people,” as she humbly called herself, in New York, where she lived and worked until her death in 1984. The subject of the retrospective exhibition Alice Neel: People Come First at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which includes approximately 100 paintings, drawings, and watercolors made between the 1920s and 1980s, the artist continues to be celebrated for her realistic portraits of regular people.