Thomas Kinkade was an American painter and writer who worked primarily in the genre of landscape painting.

Born William Thomas Kinkade III in Sacramento on January 19, 1958, he attended El Dorado High School before going on to study at the University of California, Berkeley, and later at the Art Center College of Design. These years of formal education shaped the technical foundation he would draw on throughout his career as a painter.

Kinkade achieved considerable commercial success during his lifetime through the mass marketing of his work. His paintings were reproduced and distributed as prints and licensed products via the Thomas Kinkade Company, a business model that brought his imagery into an unusually wide domestic reach. At one point, according to his company, one in every 20 American homes owned a copy of one of his paintings — a figure that speaks to the scale of his commercial operation, whatever one makes of it artistically. That level of market penetration made him a notable figure in the intersection of fine art and consumer culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

He was also credited as a writer, working in English, though the facts available here don't specify the nature or volume of that output. What is clear is that his identity as a public figure rested most heavily on his painted work and the commercial apparatus built around it.

Kinkade died on April 6, 2012, in Monte Sereno, California, at the age of 54. His full name — William Thomas Kinkade III — and the dates of his life, 1958 to 2012, are recorded in the Library of Congress authorized label. His work in landscape painting, and the reach it achieved through licensed reproduction, remained the defining characteristic of his output throughout his lifetime.