William H. Bailey was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa. He is best known for his still-life paintings but breaks with the traditional approach in his compositions by placing his chosen objects in shallow spaces, against a flat plane of color, as illustrated in the painting Still Life with Eggs, Candlesticks, and Bowl.
Bailey studied art at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, and later received his Master of Fine Arts degree at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where he studied with Josef Albers. His work is represented in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York, as well as the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Bailey has taught at the Yale School of Art, Cooper Union, New York; the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; and Indiana University, Bloomington.
