“There’s been million-seller books and million-seller CDs. But there hasn’t been, until now, million-seller art,” Kinkade told reporter Morley Safer, on 60 Minutes, in 2001. And Kinkade did make millions. His business, Thomas Kinkade Company (now Thomas Kinkade Studios), was once publicly owned, and has built a fortune selling prints via television shows like QVC and licensing images to corporations like Disney, Hallmark, and La-Z-Boy furniture. In the interview, he emphasized: “We have found a way to bring to millions of people an art that they can understand.”

But despite Kinkade’s insistence on accessibility, his practice (and the room-splitting response to it) has also embodied deeply divisive aspects of our contemporary culture—namely, that thorny place where populism and elitism collide. “I think it’s impossible to not see him as somebody who did a lot to inflame culture wars, and to make a lot of money articulating to people that they were on the outside, that people were looking down at them, that the art world was laughing at them,” said Alexis Boylan, editor of Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall, a 2011 book culling scholarly essays on Kinkade’s work and its influence.

But to understand Kinkade’s approach, we must first backtrack to his beginnings. Known to his friends and fans as Thom, Kinkade grew up in the 1960s in the small town of Placerville in northern California. After his father left the family, Kinkade and his siblings were raised, in relative poverty, by their single mother. “His mother did her best to raise three kids, but he still always longed for the home that had the lights on, all the fireplaces lit—for a warm, homey feel,” Denise Sanders, who worked alongside Kinkade for 15 years, until his death in 2012, told Artsy. (She still works at Thomas Kinkade Studios.)