ROBERT JORDAN

 

Robert Jordan had a long and productive career as an artist. He began drawing as a child and won his first recognition in Montclair, New Jersey, his childhood home, at the age of eighteen. His education included secondary school at Phillips Academy, Andover, where his talent was nurtured by his teachers. He went on to earn a BA from Dartmouth College and an MA from Columbia University. Between secondary school and college he enrolled in the Army Air Corps, and served in World War II as a tail gunner. After eleven successful missions, his plane was shot down over Hanover, Germany, where he was captured and taken prisoner. Liberated from prison camp at the end of the war, he was awarded a Purple Heart.

 

Jordan’s work is included in numerous private and public collections throughout the United States, including the National Museum of American Art, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Boston Public Library Collection, and the National Air and Space Museum. In addition to Jordan’s many solo and group exhibitions, he was chosen to represent his country in the “America 1976” Bicentennial Exhibition sponsored by the US Department of the Interior. Jordan was a tenured professor of Art History at Washington University in St. Louis, where he taught for 25 years.

 

A quiet but important voice in the tradition of American masters, Jordan brought his own interpretation of the American landscape to life through his celebrated paintings, drawings and prints. His love of New England, the White Mountains and the countryside surrounding his South Conway, NH home represent the majority of his work. However, he also painted the landscapes of the Southwest, the Midwest, and the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

 

An observer of nature in all its forms, Jordan’s true calling was as a painter of the American landscape: broad vistas of land and sky, moonlit fields, country roads and the ever-changing light, shadow, cloud formations and seasons that mark them. In his daily life at the New Hampshire farm that became his muse, Jordan spent hours photographing and observing the natural world. His focus often fell upon what might be overlooked by the casual observer, his sensitive eye seeing the most subtle and telling moments in the ever-changing light and shadow on the landscape he observed.

 

Only Jordan himself could reveal his inspiration and his method of creating as his keen mind and penetrating eye moved from the natural world to the camera and then to canvas, but we are blessed with the results in his many interpretations of the American landscape.