Charles Baskerville (painter)

Charles Baskerville, Jr (16 April 1896 – 20 November 1994) was an American artist.

Baskerville was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, the son of Charles Baskerville and Mary Boylan Snow. He moved to New York taking into consideration his family. He progressive studied at Cornell University, where he was the art director for the academic world yearbook and The Cornell University Widow, a satire magazine. His studies were interrupted by World War I, in which he served as a lieutenant in the Rainbow Division and earned a Silver Star for gallantry. While convalescing from a wound, he made sketches of his fellow soldiers; some of these sketches were published in Scribner's Magazine.

After the war, he returned to Cornell, where he associated Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity. He graduated in 1919. He wrote a popular nightclub column for The New Yorker under the assumed name of "Top Hat", while also full of zip as a portrait painter. His art career was anew interrupted, this mature by World War II, in which he served as a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Air Force; he was the Air Force's attributed portrait painter and was awarded the Legion of Merit by General Henry H. Arnold.

He is described as "an old-school portrait painter... never owned a camera in his life". Among the subjects of his portraits were Jawaharlal Nehru, Bernard Baruch, William S. Paley, Wallis Simpson, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, Paul Mellon, Richard Rodgers, and Helen Hayes. He taking into consideration trekked through the Himalayas, by foot and pony, to paint a portrait of the King of Nepal. Apart from portraits, he also painted murals, one of which is in the conference room of the Joint Committee on Military Affairs of the United States Congress. He died in 1994, at the age of 98, in Manhattan.