ROBERT REID

Muralist and Impressionist painter and founding member of the Ten American Painters, Robert Lewis Reid was born in Stockbridge, MA, in 1862. He studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Art School and also at the Académie Julian in Paris with Boulanger and Lefebvre. While studying in France in the late 1880s he spent summers painting in Normandy. He returned to New York and in 1892 received the commission to decorate one of the entrance pavilion domes in the Liberal Arts Building for the Worlds Columbian Expo. This exposure led to several important mural commissions in New York, including a ceiling in the Fifth Avenue Hotel and decorations for the Imperial Hotel, both later demolished. He continued to receive decorative commissions throughout his career, but also contributed easel works to the National Academy and to the exhibitions of the Ten. His Impressionist paintings from the late 1890s usually depicted idealized young women set in landscapes and holding or carrying flowers. Around 1910, he began a group of paintings depicting women dressed in Japanese kimonos. He moved to Colorado Springs in 1920 to join the faculty of the Broadmoor Academy. There, he concentrated on portraiture, creating “portrait impressions,” in his own terms, by quickly painting in only the essential forms and features in broad, vigorous brush strokes. He was partially paralyzed by a stroke in 1927 and spent the final two years of his life in a New York State sanitorium where he learned to paint with his left hand. He died in 1929.