Stone Roberts (born 1951) is an American representational artist known for figurative works, street scenes and still lifes.Cooper, James F. "Stone Roberts' Still Lifes Embody Beauty and Values," New York City Tribune, September 12, 1986.Hurwitz, Laurie S. "Cover Artist: Stone Roberts," American Artist, April 1994, p. 68–71.Nicholson, Louise. "Stone Roberts: A Painter Looks Back and Moves Forward." Fine Art Connoisseur, April 2012, p. 65–71. His art has been compared to European Old Masters and neoclassicists from Vermeer and Caravaggio to Jacques-Louis David and Ingres for its mastery of materials, precision of form and composition, complex play of light and detail, and heightened sense of texture and color.Burlingham, Michael J. "Stone Roberts: Intriguing Narratives," American Artist, Winter 2009, p. 60–67.Morrow, Susan. Stone Roberts: Recent Paintings, New York: Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, 2004. Nonetheless, critics also identify an equally strong contemporary strain in his inclination toward enigmatic or incongruous elements and formal choices, which raise unresolved questions involving action, time, memory and history in his paintings.Brenson, Michael. "Stone Roberts," The New York Times, November 3, 1989. Retrieved October 8, 2024.Jencks, Charles. Post-modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture, New York: Rizzoli International, 1987. Retrieved October 8, 2024.Brenner, Douglas. "Scenes From Everyday Life." House & Garden, April 1992, p. 82–84. American Artist critic Michael Burlingham wrote that rather than replicate things as they are, for Roberts "realism is a language for conjuring images of subtle imagination, works that speak to the deepest levels of experience".Burlingham, Michael J. "Stone Roberts," American Artist, February 2002, p. 20–27, 74.
Roberts has appeared in surveys at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,The Metropolitan Museum of Art. A New Generation of the 1980's: American Painters and Sculptors, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988. Drents Museum (Netherlands),American Art Collector. "Art Off the Easel: Stone Roberts," November 2017, p. 36–7.Drents Museum. "The American Dream," Exhibitions, 2017. Retrieved October 8, 2024. Orlando Museum of ArtHenry, Gerrit. "Exquisite Paintings: A Paradigm for the Twenty-first Century?" in Exquisite Paintings, Orlando, FL: Orlando Museum of Art, 1991. and Delaware Art Museum,Hyperallergic. "'Truth & Vision': 20 Contemporary Realist Painters at the Delaware Art Museum," November 14, 2016. Retrieved October 8, 2024. and had solo exhibitions at the Museum of the City of New YorkGladstone, Valerie. "Brueghel in New York," City Arts, August 30, 2012. and New Britain Museum of American Art (2015),Dunne, Susan. "Stone Roberts' People-Watching 'Street Scenes' At NBMAA," The Hartford Courant, October 13, 2015. among other venues.Aspen Art Museum. Private Worlds: 200 Years of American Still Life Painting, Aspen, CO: Aspen Art Museum, 1996, p. 45.Aston-Wash, Barbara. "Stories on Canvas," Knoxville News-Sentinel, March 7, 1999, p. E1, E3. His work belongs to the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum, de Young Museum and Asheville Art Museum, among others.The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Janet, Stone Roberts, Collection. Retrieved October 8, 2024.de Young Museum. Mark Still Life, J. Stone Roberts, Artworks. Retrieved October 8, 2024.Asheville Art Museum. Lemons, Lilies, and Gourds by J. Stone Roberts July 27, 2021. Retrieved October 8, 2024. After being based in Manhattan for most of his career, Roberts lives and works in Connecticut.Cooper, James F. "An Interview with Stone Roberts," American Arts Quarterly, Spring/Summer 1987, p.6–8.
Early life and career J. Stone Roberts was born in 1951 and raised in Asheville, North Carolina, the son of Camille Stone Roberts and Dr. Pearce Roberts Jr.; his maternal grandfather was the college athlete and coach, Stein Stone.Michener, Charles. Stone Roberts: Paintings and Drawings, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1993. Retrieved October 8, 2024.Jones Jr., John M. "Stone Roberts: Contemporary Artist with Old World Touch," The Greenville Sun, October 3, 1986, p. 12.Rice, Grantland. "Grantland Rice Tells Of Greatest Thrill In Years Of Watching Sport," Boston Daily Globe, April 27, 1924. Retrieved October 14, 2024. In 1969, Roberts entered Yale University intending a career in law or business, but after taking a printmaking course his sophomore year, changed his focus to art.Cooper, James F. "The Courage to Paint," American Arts Quarterly, Winter 1994, p. 17–18.Wengrow, Arnold. "Stone Roberts," Asheville Citizen-Times, February 24, 2002, p.C1, 5. He studied drawing under the realist painter William H. Bailey, eventually turning his interest to painting and earning a BA degree in 1973.New Britain Museum of American Art. "Stone Roberts: Street Scenes, Still Lifes, and Figures," Exhibitions, 2015. Retrieved October 8, 2024.O'Hern, John. "New York Narratives," American Art Collector, June 2013, p. 46–51. He married Elizabeth (Betsey) Barksdale Milligan in 1974 and continued his studies at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and Rome, working respectively with the painters John Moore and Ronald Markman and earning an MFA in 1975.
Roberts's inclinations toward old-master aesthetics and beauty ran contrary to the dominance of conceptualism and minimalism in contemporary art of the time. He moved to New York City in 1975 and worked in banking while painting in his free-time until 1981, when he decided to devote himself fully to art at his wife's urging.Guillermo, Jorge. "The Ambiguous World of Stone Roberts," Tableau Magazine, November 1993, p. 36–41.John Adams Institute. "Stone Roberts." Retrieved October 8, 2024. He refined his approach for a year while the couple lived at her family home in the Mississippi Delta before beginning his first large-scale work.Jones, Helena Z. "Artist Stone Roberts: A Look at his Work in the Context of his Life, in his own Words," The Greenville Sun, March 17, 1999, p. C1¬¬3.
After returning to New York, Roberts began exhibiting at Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, including his first solo show of figurative and still-life work in 1986.Raynor, Vivien. "Stone Roberts," The New York Times, September 12, 1986. Retrieved October 8, 2024. After a second show there in 1989, he exhibited at the Salander-O'Reilly (1993–2004),Thomas, Michael M. "Painter Stone Roberts—By George, He's Got It!" The New York Observer, November 9, 1998, p. 1, 15.Johnson, Ken. "Stone Roberts," The New York Times, October 29, 2004, p. E27. Retrieved October 8, 2024. Leigh Morse Fine Art (2009) and Hirschl & Adler Modern (2014) galleries in New York, as well as at the Asheville Art Museum (2007), Museum of the City of New York (2012) and New Britain Museum (2015).
Work and reception In addition to European masters, influences on Roberts's art include Greek mythology, biblical and literary sources, Roman Classicism, and painters associated with specific genres, such as Henri Fantin-Latour and Balthus, among others.Azizian, Carol A. "Boomers interpret realism," The Flint Journal, June 2, 1991. He has generally looked to these sources as launching points for new compositional and thematic ideas—introducing enigmatic, private objects and details—rather than for their direct subject matter or symbolic content.Jackson, Robert C. and Pamela Sienna. Behind the Easel: The Unique Voices of 20 Contemporary Painters, Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 2014. Retrieved October 9, 2024. Critics suggest that Roberts's attachment to traditional sources expresses a desire to retain or retrieve timeless values (aesthetics, beauty, skill) that contemporary art seemingly rejected, as well as peculiarly American experiences, objects and ways of life.Tucker, Carll. "Stone Roberts." The Patent Trader (November 13, 1998): p.1-2. Charles Michener wrote, "The driving concern in Roberts's art seems, more precisely, southern American in its yearning to arrest the reckless momentum of a democratic society that creates a spiritual vacuum."
Unlike the European masters, however, who used realism to factually document specific persons and settings, Roberts freely alters elements in his scenes, emphasizing contemporary senses of ambiguity, sensuality and the commonplace.Stevens, Mark. "Art Transplants," New York Magazine, November 30, 1998, p. 127–28. While some writers detect a modern knack for narrative tension and psychological portraiture in his work,Leigh, Catesby. "Part I: The Realists; the New Traditional Styles," Art & Antiques, Summer 2002, p. 62–69. others point to enigmatic elements—incongruous or eccentric details and juxtapositions, unnerving perspectives and offhanded arrangements. They regard his work as mysterious and irreducible to clear-cut explanation, or in Michener's words, less about revelation than reverberation. In this vein, Roberts has been compared to modern representational painters such as Lennart Anderson and John Koch, among others.
From about 1982 to 2000, Roberts alternated between ambitious, time-consuming figurative tableau and still lifes in which he pushed his explorations of paint handling, color and form. The figurative works were set within timeless New York apartments decorated with displayed signs of Southern gentility, lavish curtains and Oriental rugs; they often involved extensive preparatory sketches and graphite drawings to work out compositions, poses (of friends and family) and ideas. In the 2000s, he expanded his figurative works to New York street scenes, while continuing to paint still lifes.
Figurative works Roberts's first large-scale realistic work was Janet (1982–84), a formally structured, somewhat muted painting of a frontally placed woman in an interior with a dog, a still life, and enigmatic objects (a broken wine glass, fallen amaryllis blossom) that evoked a sense of emotional uncertainty. The work, which referenced Vermeer in composition and treatment of light, was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art a year after its completion.
Roberts's 1986 solo debut was anchored by The Conversation (1984–85), a 7.5-foot, ten-person tableau of carefully choreographed gestures and male-female relationships within a contemporary social gathering. Inspired by Virgil's story of Dido and Aeneas, it was his first "conversation piece", a genre introduced by Dutch and Flemish masters, which depicted groups of figures engaged in everyday activities.Biddle, Cordelia Francis. "Family Portraits," Town and Country, July 1994, p. 20. New York Times critic Vivien Raynor wrote that Roberts created mystery in the work by "introducing a sense of Southern graciousness into scenes that are manifestly Northern"—in this case, a uniformed maid and anachronistic classical columns within a Manhattan apartment. In 1990, the artist returned to Asheville to paint the conversation piece, The William A. V. Cecil Family, a portrait commissioned by the present-day descendants of the Vanderbilt family for the Biltmore Mansion, which required extensive historical research.Biltmore. "Collection Highlights," History. Retrieved October 9, 2024.
Over the next decade, Roberts produced a body of work that American Artist called images of upper-middle-class Protestant culture and marriage of "perfect anthropological pitch" in their orchestration of decorative details, spatial settings, light, gesture and motion. In several paintings, he presented intimate, possibly confessional, glimpses of women (primarily modeled by his wife, Betsey) in moments of interacting, dressing or resting. Of note was the balance this work struck between specificities (e.g., capturing the textures of a creased lampshade, slip or knee) and overall effect, including the "energetic charge" of the figures' sometimes uncomfortable relationships.