Robert Hamilton

In 1936, Robert Hamilton came to the Rhode Island School of Design, firmly resolved to be the next Norman Rockwell. Instead, he met his teacher, a great one, John R. Frazier, who believed in Art for Art’s sake.

Following service in the war, Hamilton, facing his first Max
Beckmann, was stupefied by its incomprehensibility. A year later, the same painting spoke to him as El Greco, Velásquez, and Piero. He knew then he had found his path.

Hamilton’s paintings rise straight up out of the wild improvisations of the Jazz Age, seeming to express in a singular and emphatic vision the entire procession of Western art. Witty, wildly colorful, eccentric, at times elegiac, they encompass both personal history and canny artistic commentary, all out of metamorphosis and audacious, surprising arrivals.

R. G. Hamilton (1985-2004) taught painting and drawing at the R.I.S.D. for 34 years. In 1981, he retired to Port Clyde, Maine, where he built two small galleries. He would paint
all winter, then put up thirty or forty new pictures, and invite people to take a look. He sometimes called it: The Last Free Show on Earth.

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