Tennessee Williams: Playwright and Painter featured nine Tennessee Williams paintings from the 1970s on loan from David Wolkowsky, one of Williams’ closest friends and a member of one of the earliest Jewish families to settle in Key West.
While he wrote fiction and motion picture screenplays, Williams is most widely known for his plays, which are chiefly set in the South. Several of his plays, including A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, are considered among the finest of the American stage. For more than 30 years, Williams lived and wrote in a cottage on a quiet Key West street. As a form of relaxation, he took up oil painting on his patio, often sketching friends, acquaintances, and characters from his plays Williams first took up painting in the early 1960s when his career as a playwright slowed.
