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About Robert E. Owen
Young Robert Owen studied in the Drury Academy in North Adams, then in 1898 at the Eric Pape School of Art in Boston. Meanwhile, he had been submitting pen-and-ink drawings to Life Magazine, The Boston Globe, Christian Endeavor, and other publications. In his earliest paintings, Owen combined sharply outlined architectural structures with sketchy impressionistic figures, as Claude Monet rendered them in Boulevard des Capucines (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri). In 1900, Owen went to New York City, married Miriam Rogg three years later, then moved to Bagnall, Connecticut in 1910. He studied for a while with tonalist Leonard Ochtman, assisted in the formation of the Greenwich Society of Artists in 1912 and became a member of the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts in 1915. Owen continued his illustration work and rarely abandoned his strong tendency to define solid objects with prominent outlines.
Owen established his own gallery in New York in 1923, then moved into the Rembrandt Building, adjacent to Carnegie Hall. He exhibited his works at the National Academy of Design (1912 and 1914) and at the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts in Hartford. In 1936, eighty-six of his paintings were shown at the Dwight Art Memorial, Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Later in 1941 he moved to New Rochelle to work as artist-in-residence at the Thomas Paine Memorial Museum.
Snow Storm evokes the subtle art of John H. Twachtman. The viewer, in the middle of a heavy snowstorm, seems to be standing on a bridge over a stream in the center of the picture space. This is balanced by a central tree and a country house, while the tree on the left prevents the composition from being too symmetrical. Both the stream and the picturesque wooden fence lead the eye into the distance. Two smaller buildings lie at the vanishing point. The windblown snow softens all forms, including natural and man-made, and provides a unity of texture. As in depictions of snowstorms by other impressionists, the range of values is purposefully limited. |
Paintings by Robert E. Owen
| Snow Storm |
| oil on canvas: 25 x 30 inches |
| signed: lower left |
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