Mickey's Dining Car, 1979

John Baeder (b. 1938 - ) is an American painter closely associated with the Photorealist movement. He is best known for his detailed paintings of American roadside diners and eateries. His interest in small towns across America began when he was young by photographing old cars and other relics with a Baby Brownie camera. While attending Auburn University in the late 1950s, he made frequent trips between Atlanta and Alabama, which drew his attention to rural landscapes and roadside diners. He started working as an art director in Atlanta for a branch of a New York City advertising agency in 1960. He went on to have a successful career in advertising through the early 1970s, while continuing to paint, draw and photograph on his own time. Baeder left the advertising field in 1972 to pursue his artistic career full-time.According to John Arthur, ÒJohn Baeder is much more than a painter of diners. He is a knowledgeable and deeply committed chronicler of that rapidly disappearing facet of American vernacular architecture that has played such a unique role in our social and cultural history.Ó Vincent Scully, professor of the History of Art in Architecture and author, further comments on BaederÕs visual style in his introduction to Diners, 1978, stating that his "paintings seem to me to differ from most of those of his brilliant Magic-Realist contemporaries in that they are gentle, lyrical, and deeply in love with their subjects. Most of the painters of the contemporary Pop scene blow our minds with massive disjunctions, explosive changes of scale, and special kind of wink-less visual focus. Baeder does not employ any of those devices. He sees everything as its own size in its proper environment. His diners fit into their urban context like modest folk heroes."