When Bearden was young, his family’s home at West 140th Street in Harlem was often filled with his parents’ friends, including musicians Duke Ellington and Fats Waller, poet Langston Hughes, writer W. E. B. Du Bois, and artist Aaron Douglas. These early encounters with the cultural and intellectual elite fostered Bearden’s lifelong love of learning. He graduated from New York University and continued his studies at the famous Art Students League in New York City and the Sorbonne in Paris. He often visited museums, including the Metropolitan Museum, where he studied the painting techniques of Goya, Manet, Tintoretto, and Tiepolo. He was influenced by the art of the Cubists, such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris and by the work of his friends and fellow jazz lovers, Stuart Davis and Jacob Lawrence. Lawrence characterized Bearden as “an intellectually curious person, experimental and scholarly, very much involved and curious …[who] studied the old masters and the moderns. He attended the exhibitions outside of the Harlem community—galleries and museums. And he would come back and talk about these things.” [4]