Matthew Barnes

Matthew Rackham Barnes (1880–1951) was a Scottish-born American painter and ornamental plasterer. He settled in San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and developed a largely self-taught practice centered on nocturnal cities and landscapes assembled from memory and imagination. Barnes worked in Diego Rivera’s San Francisco fresco circle in 1931–32 and appears among the laborers in Rivera’s The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art presented solo exhibitions of his work in 1938, 1944, and, posthumously, 1952; the Museum of Modern Art acquired High Peak (1936) in 1944.