A door-to-door salesman meets a portrait artist who asks him to sit for her. The artist, Alice Neel, becomes famous years later as does her iconic painting “Fuller Brush Man.” This is the story of the man behind the portrait, Dewald Strauss, his son’s discovery of “Fuller Brush Man,” and the struggle for his recognition as the true subject of the previously anonymous painting.
Dewald escapes Dachau only to return to Germany as an American soldier to confront the Nazis in his former homeland. He fights courageously in the Battle of the Bulge and is awarded both the Purple Heart and Bronze Star. Upon his return, he becomes a Fuller Brush Man, just like thousands of other door-to-door salesmen around the country, selling household goods of every type imaginable. Little did he know that one of his customers would immortalize him in her painting, “Fuller Brush Man.”
Magnificent illustrations highlight this incredible true tale of a holocaust survivor who became one of the Greatest Generation’s war heroes, his iconic portrait brought to life by one of America’s greatest artists, and a lost identity redeemed.