American
Eliot O'Hara, namesake of the O'Hara watercolor box, was an influential American artist and teacher who greatly popularized watercolor painting in America. In the early 1930s O'Hara started publishing a series of instructional books that gave art students and art teachers a solid curriculum of study in the field of watercolor painting. Mr. O'Hara's books include Making Watercolor Behave (1932), Making the Brush Behave (1935), Watercolor Fares Forth (1938), Art Teachers Primer (1939), Watercolor At Large (1946), Watercolor With O'Hara (1966), and Portraits in the Making (1948). In the late 40s and early 50s O'Hara was commissioned to produce 24 art instructional films for Encyclopedia Britannica. Eliot O'Hara was an avid traveler, painting in India and Russia in the 1920s, and he continued painting world-wide throughout his lifetime. He started winning AWS (American Watercolor Society) awards in the early 1930s and established the Eliot O'Hara Watercolor School in Goose Rocks Beach, Maine in 1931. The school was later destroyed in a forest fire in 1947. — Watercolor Masters: Eliot O'Hara © 2010 Greg Conley —
