Manon Cleary

Manon Cleary (November 14, 1942 – November 26, 2011 in St. Louis, Missouri) was an American realist painter who worked and lived in the District of Columbia.
Cleary was born in St. Louis, Missouri; she had an identical twin sister, Shirley Cleary-Cooper, who is also an artist. After studying in Rome where she developed an interest in Caravaggio, Cleary studied at Washington University in St. Louis and Temple University. She settled in Washington, D.C., in 1974 and taught at the University of the District of Columbia for thirty years. In 2001, she married F. Steven Kijek.
Cleary's works have been exhibited worldwide including in a solo ten-year retrospective at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1985 and in 2006 in a career retrospective at the Washington Arts Museum at Edison Place. In 1997, one of her paintings at an erotic art auction was featured on an episode of HBO's Real Sex.
Cleary had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and died at her home in Washington, D.C. She was 69.