Beautiful Robert Rucker watercolor paper. 32.5 x 22.5 inches. Provenance: private owner.
Biography: 1932 - 2001. Robert Malcolm Rucker was born March 28, 1932 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and died March 7, 2001 in Mandeville, Louisiana. He was an oil painter who occasionally used watercolor, and his style combined realism and impressionism. He was primarily known for landscapes but also did many paintings of plantation homes, steamboats, and other aspects of Louisiana life and culture. Most of his life he lived in New Orleans.Rucker is really the heir to the nineteenth-century Louisiana landscape school of painting. He has a great kinship with the romantic descriptive images of Richard Clague (1821-1873), William Henry Buck (1840-1888) and Marshall J. Smith (1854-1923).Robert Rucker grew up in New Orleans during the Depression. His earlydabbling in paint led to him opening his own French Quarter gallery with the help of his mother. He was just 15 years old. He painted an average of five paintings a month from that time. When he was 17, he was stricken with polio. Because of this, The Louisiana Department of Education funded his education at the John McCrady School of Fine Arts in New Orleans.His mature subjects recreate Louisiana in her golden past with amazing historical accuracy, in both detail and composition: sternwheelers steaming down the Mississippi (his father was a steamboat captain), colonial plantations set among cotton fields, rustic moonlit cabins, stands of old cypress in the bayous, and solitary live oaks garlanded with Spanish moss.In his early career, Rucker taught painting in his own studio and courses inart and ceramic for the New Orleans Recreation Department. He worked as atextile designer and as a medical artist at Tulane University School ofMedicine. Rucker passed away on March 7, 2001 of a heart attack. Hisbeautiful work will remain with us forever.

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American, 19th century: This work was executed by an unknown hand, and can only be identified by origin (i.e., region, period).

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