Robert Hamilton

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“My fiction now is that I want to be the best totally unknown painter in the world.”
—Robert G. Hamilton
(1916-2004).

Biography:

In 1936, R.G. Hamilton (1916-2004) came down from Seneca Falls, N.Y. to the Rhode Island School of Design, firmly resolved to be the next Norman Rockwell. It didn’t turn out that way. He met a great teacher, John R. Frazier, whose basic premise was Art for Art’s sake. That sounded good to Hamilton then, and did for the rest of his life.

Frazier taught him to paint, Hamilton has said, like John Singer Sargent in winter, and as much like Monet as possible in summer. The war in Europe found him in the captain’s seat of a P-47 fighter-bomber, wherefrom he flew 100 combat missions, and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross. At the war’s end, he returned to painting, and in 1947, to R.I.S.D., to teach painting and drawing. Despite serious macular degeneration in one eye, Hamilton worked at his painting virtually every day for the rest of his life.

Hamilton has said that as Frazier was his teacher, so was Max Beckmann his master. Facing his first Beckmann in the late 40’s, he was stupefied by its incomprehensibility. A year later, the same painting spoke to him as El Greco, Valesquez, and Piero, albeit in different forms. Rocketing straight up at him out of the wild improvisations of the Jazz Age, Hamilton knew he had found his path. From his jazz heroes—Louis, Bix, Hawk—he understood that his paintings needed to be spontaneous, made up out of whole cloth, one thing leading to another, accidental, a series of metamorphoses, and surprised arrivals. Their witty eccentricity couched both personal history and canny artistic commentary—an emphatic and singular vision composed it seemed of the entire procession of Western art.

In 1981, after 34 years, he retired from teaching at R.I.S.D., and with his beloved wife, Nancy, repaired to their summer cottage in Port Clyde, Maine. In a great field overlooking the harbor he built two small museums. He would paint all winter in his waterfront studio, then put thirty or forty new pictures up in the galleries, and invite people to take a look. He sometimes called it: The last free show on earth.