Robert Lewis Reid

Robert Lewis Reid (1862- 1929) was an American impressionist painter and mural painter.

He did his art training under Otto Grundmann at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts and later became an instructor there. He moved to study at the Art Students League in New York City in 1884, and then on to Paris to study under Jules Joseph Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger at the Academie Julian in 1885. His early work, painted in Etaples, featured French peasants.

In 1889 he returned to New York and worked painting portraits as well as working at the Arts Students League and Cooper Union as an instructor. His favourite subject was painting young women in amongst flowers and his work was regarded as very decorative. He also became known for stained glass designs and murals contributing in 1893 to frescoes for the dome of the Liberal Arts Building at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago and murals in 1896 in the Thomas Jefferson Building in Washington D.C.

After working full time on these mural projects for a number of years, when he returned to painting pictures in 1905, his style had changed to be more naturalistic although he kept with a soft pastel palette.

Reid painted large panels for a number of public buildings including the Appellate Court House in New York (Paul Revere’s Ride‘,) the State House in Boston (‘Boston Tea Party) and the Congressional Library in Washington DC. ( James Otis Delivering his Speech against Writs of Assistance’)

In 1900 he painted a panel for the American Pavilion at the Paris Exhibition and in 1906 he finished ten stained glass windows for Fairhaven’s Unitarian Memorial Church.

He also painted a panel for the 1900 Paris Exhibition which appeared in the American Pavilion

He also produced eight huge panels for the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915 which hung in the rotunda of the Palace of Fine Arts. These are now sadly lost.