Priscilla Roberts
Birth Date: June 13, 1916
Death Date: 2001
Artist Gallery
Priscilla Roberts lived a somewhat reclusive life in Connecticut with a dozen cats for company, painting twelve to sixteen hours a day the common placed objects she has so fortuitously discovered. Roberts studied art for one year at Radcliffe College and like her father and grandfather before her, attended Yale University, enrolling in its School of Art. She studied at The Art Students League with Curran and she also attended the National Academy of Design. In her retrospective book that Roberts typed she wrote about the Rocking Chair. “My first major painting, the Canton “Rocking Chair” was done in 1944 at my mother’s suggestion –I remember rocking in it one evening while worrying about what I should do next and her saying “Why not paint the chair you’re sitting in?” She always loved this painting. Priscilla Roberts describes our painting “Rocking Chair” in a letter that was sent to Sara Schneider: “I’ve always been especially fond of this painting since so many of the things in it are family heirlooms—the rocking chair and footstool came from my mother’s family in New Gloucester, Maine and are at least 100 years old and the cashmere shawl on the table is a great deal older. It is just a fragment; really, of what must have been a very beautiful handwoven shawl. My grandmother made the braided rug on the floor and her father always kept his diaries and most important papers in the cowhide box behind the chair. The oil lamp is perfectly authentic but I think a more elaborate one with a painted glove would have been more suitable for a parlor table—lamps like this are so common nowadays in antique stores, but in 1944 when I did the painting I couldn’t find one anywhere and had to us the plain glass instead. The picture over the table is of my father’s great-grandfather with his 7 brothers and sisters. They were the nieces and nephews of General Joseph Warren and the photograph was made from 2 Daguerreotypes taken in about 1850 on the only occasion in their whole lives when they were all together at the same time—the family was so large that the older children had left home before the younger ones were born”. The artist tells us a good deal about her life and her thoughts by sharing in pictorial form her favorite possessions – those simple things which are the wellsprings of her painstakingly structured compositions of the unexpected. She would spend hours and sometimes weeks painstakingly searching for just the right color of Persian yarn or arranging the still life in just right way. Roberts was obsessed with the still life to which she was able to give a new and magical dimension and has become known for her work of Magic Realism. Roberts was an intriguing Magic Realist and seems to have fallen between the cracks of American Art History along with the once well-known venue that regularly showed her haunting still-life, Grand Central Galleries.