Robert Remsen Vickrey was born on Aug. 26, 1926, in Manhattan. Vickrey, who mastered the Renaissance technique of egg tempera painting as a student at Yale, used his consummate skill to create, in his early work, hyper-real scenes suffused by an atmosphere of dread or impending disaster. He was an avant-garde filmmaker on the side, with a deep knowledge of expressionism and film noir, whose shadows, angles and distortions he introduced into his paintings.
After earning a bachelor’s degree at Yale in 1947, he spent a year in New York studying with Reginald Marsh and Kenneth Hayes Miller at the Art Students League before returning to Yale, where he received a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1950. In the 1950s and ’60s Mr. Vickrey was a highly visible artist. He was included in no fewer than nine of the Whitney Museum’s annual exhibitions showcasing contemporary art. He was also commissioned to paint dozens of portraits for the cover of Time, notably a portrait from life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for the magazine’s Man of the Year issue in 1964.
A turning point in his development came when he took a required course with Lewis E. York on egg tempera technique, about which he later wrote two books: New Techniques in Egg Tempera (1973), with Diane Cochrane, and Robert Vickrey: Artist at Work (1979).
Painting on primed masonite panels, Mr. Vickrey began fusing realism and surrealism in city scenes that showed children making chalk marks on the sidewalk, nuns walking down labyrinthine streets or adolescents caught in a web of luminous halos and shadows cast by bicycle spokes.
He created seventy eight cover paintings for Time magazine between the years 1957 and 1968. Forty eight of these covers are part of the permanent collection in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Gallery.
He won fifty-four major national prizes, has been elected to full membership in the National Academy of Design and the American Watercolor Society. He has been featured in numerous major publications including American Artist and American Art Collector magazines. Vickrey has also authored four books, The Artist at Work, New Techniques in Egg Tempera, The Affable Curmudgeon and A Con Man’s Carnival. Vickrey has held more than one hundred solo shows at museums and galleries throughout the U.S. and has 125 of his paintings represented in the permanent collections of approximately seventy public museums and institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery and the National Academy of Design.
