Francis Cunningham is an American figurative painter known for working across three genres – nude, landscape and still-life —and for being an influential master instructor. He co-founded the New Brooklyn School of Life, Painting, Drawing & Sculpture, Inc. (1980–1983), and the New York Academy of Art in 1983 with sculptor Barney Hodes and Stuart Pivar.
He currently maintains studios in Manhattan and in the bucolic western part of Massachusetts, known as the Berkshires. Cunningham graduated from Harvard College in 1953. After two years as a lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps, he attended the Art Students League of New York (1955–1959), where he studied drawing and anatomy with Roberty Beverly Hale and painting with Edwin Dickinson. He taught for four years at the Art Students League of New York. He is the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant (1973), and was a Fellow with the Bogliasco Foundation (1997).
