Robert Reid

Reid, Robert Lewis (29 July 1862-2 Dec. 1929), impressionist and mural painter, was born in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, the son of Jared Reid, Jr., and Louisa Dwight. His father was the founder of the Edwards Place School for boys in Stockbridge and was headmaster until its failure in 1878, when he went to work as a salesman and dispersed his children among relatives. Reid spent his late adolescence partly with his parents in Andover, Massachusetts, and partly with his brother Charles in Hartford and Westfield, Connecticut. Limited financial resources were the backdrop against which Reid struggled until he was well established as an artist.

Reid was educated at his father's school and at Phillips Academy in Andover. He entered the School of Painting and Drawing at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in the winter session of 1880-1881. He immediately became an assistant instructor and served as such for three of his four years at the museum school. Reid's education was conservative; his teachers included Otto Grundmann and Frederic Crowninshield, both of whom demanded anatomical accuracy in portrait and figure drawing. In fact, competence in drawing took precedence over painting. Crowninshield also introduced his students to stained glass design.

Reid's fellow students included Edmund C. Tarbell and Frank W. Benson, with whom Reid would later be professionally associated in the group known as Ten American Painters. While an art student, Reid was ambitious and noticed as something of a maverick. He founded and wrote for Art Student, a magazine for the students of the museum school.

Early in 1885 Reid moved to New York City to study at the Art Students League. By autumn he had decided to go to Paris, although his letters from Europe reveal that his going abroad entailed "substantial family sacrifice" (Weinberg, p. 4). He studied at the Académie Julian, where instruction continued in the conservative academic tradition to which he was accustomed. By 1887 he was working with Gustave-Rodolphe Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre, the favorite teaching team of Americans at Julian's. In company with Tarbell and Willard Metcalf, another museum school alumnus, Reid also took classes taught by the American expatriate William Turner Dannat. For the three years he was in France Reid spent nine months of the year in Paris and summered at Etaples, a fishing village on the coast of Normandy. This pattern was broken only by a tour of Italy during the winter of 1886-1887.

The immediate goal to which Reid and all American students in Paris aspired was to have their paintings chosen for exhibition in the annual Paris Salon. In 1887 Reid submitted for the first time a painting to the Salon jury. His letters home while he awaited the decision of the judges reveal his character to be ambitious and confident, yet in no way grandiose. Reid's submission, The First Communion, was accepted for the Salon of 1887. Painted at Etaples, it represented a local peasant girl about to take her first communion. Flight into Egypt, exhibited at the Salon of 1888, and Blessing the Boats, exhibited the following year, also used Etaplesian fisherfolk as their models.

Reid returned to New York in 1889, bringing with him some of his paintings executed abroad. Flight into Egypt was included that year in the autumn exhibition at the National Academy of Design. Death of the First Born, when exhibited at the Society of American Artists in 1889, won him election to that organization. He taught at Cooper Union and the Art Students League and shared a studio for a time with Metcalf in the Sherwood Studio Building.

Reid's conversion to impressionism occurred between his storytelling paintings executed in France and Reverie, painted in the United States in 1890. The subject of Reverie--a woman in a lush garden setting--exhibits an impressionist's choice of subject as well as an impressionist's technique in the rendering of light and color. From 1892 Reid was regularly referred to as an impressionist.

Reid's paintings were included in the annual exhibitions of the National Academy of Design, where he won the Thomas B. Clarke prize in 1897 and the first Hallgarten prize in 1898; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; and the Society of American Artists until his break with that organization in 1899. He was also a frequent contributor to the regular juried exhibitions sponsored by the Art Institute of Chicago; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where he won the Clarke prize of $1,000 in 1908; and the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh.

Reid's first opportunity to paint a mural came in 1892, when he was commissioned to decorate one of eight domes in the entrance pavilion to the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Reid's painting of female allegorical figures representing the decorative arts earned him a Special Medal for Decoration.

For years Reid pursued the dual careers of easel painter and muralist. He painted murals for the Fifth Avenue Hotel (1892-1893), the Imperial Hotel, and the Apellate Division Court House of the New York State Supreme Court (1899), all in New York; the Massachusetts State House (1901); the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; the U.S. Pavilion at the Exposition Universelle in Paris (1900), for which he received a gold medal; the dome of the Fine Arts Palace at Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco (1914-1915); and an altarpiece for the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in New York. Reid's mural subjects were figural, and his style was to render them large, firmly drawn, and solidly colored. Around 1901, in order to accommodate the large canvases on which he had to work, he took a studio on East Thirty-third Street that was so large his friends nicknamed it the "Golf Links."

Reid's easel paintings most often featured young women singly or in groups of two or three amidst a flowering garden on a sunny spring or summer day. Nude or clothed in light-colored frocks, they blend into their lush surroundings rendered in the broken brushwork of impressionism. Reid minimized depth, combining figure with setting on the same plane to create a two-dimensional, decorative effect. Picture titles were more often inspired by the setting than the figure, such as Gladiolas (c. 1898), Fleur-de-Lis (c. 1899), and Breezy Day (c. 1898).

Between 1901 and 1905 Reid was occupied with the design and execution of some twenty stained glass windows for the H. H. Rogers Memorial Church in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. It was a time-consuming project, with much trial and error going into the artist's attempt to master the unfamiliar medium. By 1908 Reid began to paint women indoors, still in light-filled settings, their images often reflected in a mirror. The Open Fire, which won the Bronze Medal at the Corcoran Gallery in 1908, is one such indoor painting in which the glow from a fireplace plays off the figure's skin and dress. The model for this painting was Elizabeth Reeves, whom Reid had married in 1907. The marriage ended in divorce in 1916.

From 1898 until 1917 Reid exhibited nearly every year with the Ten American Painters, a group of artists who resigned in protest from the Society of American Artists and organized themselves for the mutual promotion of their work. Until about 1909 Reid spent summers painting at Medfield, Massachusetts, and Somers Center, New York. From 1920 to 1927 he taught at the Broadmoor Art Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado. After suffering a stroke that paralyzed his right side in 1927, Reid lived in a sanatorium at Clifton Springs, New York, and taught himself to draw and paint with his left hand. He died at Clifton Springs.

In addition to the honors mentioned above, Reid became an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1902 and an academician four years later. He was given a one-man show at the academy the year before his death. There were also one-man shows at Grand Central Galleries and the Brooklyn Museum in 1929.

Bibliography

The Robert L. Reid Papers are in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. For appraisals of Reid's work by his contemporaries, see Henry W. Goodrich, "Robert Reid and His Work," International Studio 36 (Feb. 1909): cxiii-cxxii, and James W. Pattison, "Robert Reid, Painter," House Beautiful 20 (July 1906): 18-20. H. Barbara Weinberg discusses Reid's life and work in "Robert Reid: Academic 'Impressionist,' " Archives of American Art Journal 15 (1975): 2-11, and The Lure of Paris: Nineteenth-Century American Painters and Their French Teachers (1991). See also William H. Gerdts et al., Ten American Painters (1990), and Ulrich W. Hiesinger, Impressionism in America: The Ten American Painters (1991). An obituary is in the New York Times, 3 Dec. 1929.

Cynthia Seibels

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