page_title: Nicholas Volpe
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Nicholas Volpe / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: A charcoal drawing reprint of Burt Lancaster after winning an Academy Award in 1960. Deutsch: Nachdruck einer Kohlezeichnung von Burt Lancaster nach dem Gewinn des Oscars 1960.
context_page_description: Nicholas A. Volpe was an American artist, noted for his portraits of Hollywood celebrities, presidents, sports figures, and other famous personalities. He is said to have painted more movie stars than any other artist in America.
context_section_description: Volpe later accepted a position as a fine art instructor at New York City's Leonardo da Vinci Art School. After a few years there he accepted the post of Dean of Arts at Jacksonville College in Florida, where he spent three years. He next decided to move to Hollywood, California after he received an offer by a studio to design film sets, create make-up and design costumes.
  During this period, his talent as a portrait artist was soon noticed, as he had also by then painted or drawn portraits of various stars, and his reputation as a highly skilled artist became widely recognized. As a result, Volpe was given a lifetime contract by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences to paint each year's Oscar winning Best Actor and Best Actress. The majority of his Oscar portraits were made with charcoal pencil.
  Beside his annual Academy Awards paintings, Vople painted commissions such as Frank Sinatra's album Only the Lonely in 1958. This earned him a Grammy Award for Best Album Cover.
   During Volpe's career, he would paint Sinatra 24 times, more than any other celebrity, including a full-size painting now displayed at the Friars Club of Beverly Hills.
  With his fame as an artist increasing, in 1964, he was commissioned by The Beatles to paint portraits of each of the four members of the group during their first American tour.  Capitol Records created posters from the final illustrations. He was also commissioned to do a portrait of Johnny Cash for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
  After winning a Grammy he was also commissioned by Hollywood's famed Brown Derby restaurant to paint portraits of up to 200 top recording artists to be displayed in the restaurant's Hall of Fame Record Room. His Oscar paintings were displayed in the restaurant's "Academy Room," created for showing Volpe's art. On other occasions, he was asked to paint the team members of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, and various other sports teams had likewise commissioned his art. Along with stars and sports figures, he painted portraits of leading political figures, including John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. He traveled to Israel to paint its first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion.
  Volpe wrote and illustrated a regular newspaper column in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, with articles covering various travel topics about California. He also traveled across the country during tours where he appeared on television, gave radio interviews, and spoke to audiences at various events. In 1973 he returned to teaching art at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California.
caption: Academy Award portrait of Burt Lancaster
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