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Mark Tobey (1890-1976) was a leading painter of the Northwest School. Tobey became renowned for an energetic, Eastern influenced "white writing" style of abstraction painted originally to express the frenetic pulse of New York City, a style which influenced Jackson Pollock among others. He was the first painter of the Northwest School to achieve international fame. Personally, he was an irritable, irascible man with many difficult relationships though also a few close friends. Tobey moved to Seattle in 1923 and began teaching art classes at the Cornish School. He spent 1925 and 1926 in Europe and then returned to Seattle in 1927. For the next three decades, Tobey was a veritable gypsy, constantly on the move from Seattle to New York, Chicago, England, and various countries in Europe. Tobey taught in his studio, by appointment. He was an important teacher to students such as Wehr and James Washington Jr. He also regularly rode the bus to Tacoma to teach an art class there, and came home with $40 for an afternoon's work. He appears to have had the gift for helping students find their own strengths as painters. Tobey became good friends with Seattle artists Paul Horiuchi and George Tsutakawa. In 1956, Tobey's paintings were part of the American Painting exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London, which introduced the budding American abstract style to England. He also was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters and receiving a Guggenheim International Award. In June 1958, Tobey was awarded First Prize in the XXIX Venice Biennale, the art world's most prestigious recognition. In June 1960, Tobey moved to Basel, Switzerland, where he spent the rest of his life in a house at 69 Saint Albanvorstadt, where John Calvin had once lived. Tobey held the status of Niedergelassener, the Swiss designation for one who has all the rights of Swiss citizenship except the right to vote. Tobey retained his Seattle studio, using it until the late 1960s during his annual summer visits.

Although he was celebrated as an abstract painter, Tobey never considered his pictures abstract. He spoke of seeing whole worlds in the bark of trees, or on pavements. He is quoted as saying that, to him, pure abstraction would be a painting where one finds no correspondence to life