His interest started when he was a boy, around the same time he took up singing. While music brought him fame, painting brought him peace. As Bennett told the Los Angeles Times in 1995, he’d been performing on the road ever since he was recruited by Hope. When fatigue struck, he turned to painting.

“I love to paint as much as I love to sing,” Bennett told the Associated Press in 2006, describing painting as “a big lift” that allowed him to “stay in this creative zone all the time.”

The artist differentiated his two careers by his signature: As a singer, he was Tony Bennett, but as a painter, he used his given name, Anthony Benedetto. One of Benedetto’s oil paintings is housed in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

“The work that we have is this beautiful, quasi-impressionistic, realistic view of Central Park,” says Randal Griffey, the museum’s head curator. “He loved the park, as a lot of New Yorkers do, because it allowed him to feel connected to nature … despite being immersed in the city.”