Robert Vickrey American, 1926-2011

Robert Remsen Vickrey was a Massachusetts-based artist and author who specialized in the ancient medium of egg tempera. His paintings are surreal dreamlike visions of sunset shadows of bicycles, nuns in front of mural-painted brick walls, and children playing.

He was one of the illustrators of Time covers during the period from 1942 to 1966, which has been called the golden age of Time covers. His portrait of J.D. Salinger, from a 1961 Time cover, was hung at the National Gallery of Art following the writers death in 2010. Other cover artists during this period included Boris Artzybasheff, James Ormsbee Chapin, Bernard Safran and Boris Chaliapin.

His work with tempera has aligned him with fellow tempera artists Andrew Wyeth, Jared French and Paul Cadmus, who also "attempted to combine Surrealism with Realism, the amalgam being termed Magic Realism."

His works are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro.