Robert Henry Logan (1874-1942)

Robert Henry Logan was born in Waltham, Massachusetts on June 24, 1874 where his father John Logan was a foreman in a watch factory. After developing a new spring technology for watches, the Logan Family became financially independent allowing Robert to pursue a career in art.
After completing studies at the Browne and Nichols school in Cambridge, he attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and studied with noted American Impressionist artists, Frank Benson and Edmund Tarbell. In 1892 he received the school’s top drawing prize.

In 1895 he left for France to study at the Academie Julian, where he was guided by Louis Joseph, Raphael Collin, Jean Paul Laurens, and Benjamin Constant. In Paris he also studied with Robert Henri and associated with many other American artists including William Glackens. Through Henri, Logan met the artist James Willam Morrice and during the first decade of the twentieth century the two men traveled and painted throughout Europe, England and Northern Africa. Logan exhibited at the Salon of the Societe des Artistes Francais and in 1905 was awarded the Prix de Rome.

In spite of his growing success he returned to Waltham in 1912. He established a studio there and another in Rockport, Massachusetts, where he continued to paint for the next ten years. After his marriage in 1920 to Ruth Mae Hill he virtually gave up painting, though he continued to teach selected students, and as his health declined in 1927 he turned his attention to woodworking and ironwork. After his death in 1942, many of his works remained secluded in the home of his only son Elmer Murray Logan. In 1978 a collection of over nine hundred of Logans drawings and paintings were discovered in a warehouse and interest in his work was revived through museum and gallery exhibitions.