Robert L. Reid

Blue Nude
c. 1912
Oil on Canvas
18 x 14 ¾

Robert L. Reid (1862-1929)

A founding member of “The Ten American Painters,” a group formed to promote Impressionism in United States, Robert Lewis Reid is a significant figure in the history of art in America. His work can be found in virtually all of the nation’s leading museums, including the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Museum of Fine Art, Boston and dozens more.

A native of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Reed was both a student and a teacher at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston from 1880-1884 and then studied at the Art Students League in New York before heading to Paris to study at the Academie Julian under Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefevre. Upon his return to the U.S., he quickly gained recognition for his outstanding mural work (including a series of works for the Library of Congress) and compelling landscape and figural paintings.

Classically trained, Reid gravitated to Impressionism gradually during his odyssey as a painter and not fully embrace it until close to the turn of the 20th century and eventually began to shift away. William H. Gerdts in his definitive book American Impressionism (1984) notes that around 1910, oriental sensibilities began to influence Reid’s work, including a flattening of perspective, emphasis on outline and a shift in coloration. Gerdts quotes a contemporary (to Reid) art critic’s observations on a 1910 exhibit:

Reid is only an impressionist in his backgrounds and landscapes. In his figures he paints more smoothly and solidly…. A figure is never seen en pointillist. A figure even at a distance is seen in planes and vague outlines. Vibration is there but a vibration which can be better expressed en masse than in broken up surfaces…. Of late he has become more reticent. Mystic blues, purples, light green and blue greys seem to fascinate him most….”

The critic might well have been describing The Blue Nude.

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