Biddle's tale involves mostly the Depression-era, American Scene mural painting, for which Biddle was personally responsible, by suggesting a government-sponsored program to his old friend and classmate Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Born on January 24, 1885 in Philadelphia, Biddle received his B.A. from Harvard where he then completed his doctorate in law. He received art instruction at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, at the Académie Julian in Paris and then in Munich. During the first world war, Biddle lived in Giverny (1915-16) where he painted outdoor nudes. During this last wave of American expatriate painters at Giverny, Biddle was clearly influenced by Frederick Frieseke, as he explained: "Long summers I spent in Giverny near my friend Fred Frieseke, painting in the good plein air, impressionist tradition. Frieseke had a clear palette. I fell into it as a duck takes to water, after the mud of Munich, Julien's [sic] and the Pennsylvania Academy." Biddle added that one could see Monet "over his garden wall;" he knew Louis Ritman and he even met Rodin.
Captain George Biddle served in the G2 Section of the First Army Corps during the war, was discharged in April 1919, and traveled clear to Tahiti to erase the memories of war and to find peace (1920-22). There he explored various media: wood and stone sculpture, wood block prints and even marquetry. His depictions of Tahitians display Gauguin's influence in the outlining of forms — here almost a cloisonnisme, while the human figures have a statuesque massiveness and no trace of accidental lighting.
Biddle returned to America, this time to New York City and continued with sculpture, but soon he was back in Paris. That was during an exciting decade of American expatriatism — when even some bohemians were well off financially and there was plenty of intellectual and aesthetic stimulation, as Brancusi, Zadkine, Marie Laurencin, Léger, and Chagall met in the café crowd. Biddle visited Gertrude Stein's salon, met James Joyce, Marsden Hartley, and other stars of modernism. He dropped in on Mary Cassatt in January 1926, five months before her death. She still had praise for Degas, and wondered what the world was coming to when such art as Laurencin's was widely accepted. In April, John Singer Sargent dies in his sleep — another great American expatriate who witnessed the flowering of impressionism. American art had passed beyond impressionism and Biddle would soon be a leader in the promotion of a dynamic national school of mural art.
He died at Croton-on-Hudson, New York in 1973.
Tahitian Beauty, 1921, Oil on canvas, Signed and dated lower right, 20 x 24 1/4 inches