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Robert Valentine was a landscape and portrait painter from Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. He was born December 23, 1879, at his family's home in Bellefonte. His father, Jacob Downing Valentine, was a second-generation ironmaster and senior member of the Valentine Company iron furnace. Valentine received his education at the Bellefonte Academy and the Westtown Friends School near Westchester, Pennsylvania. His passion for art seems to have developed at an early age, and was encouraged by a brother and some of his cousins who were also artists. When he was attending the Bellefonte Academy in 1900, he provided a series of illustrations for the school paper, The Addisonian Mirror.
After his father's death, Valentine received an inheritance from his father's iron business that allowed him to live comfortably. He attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia from 1911 to 1913, studying under Thomas Anshutz, and later studied with Emil Carlsen, Philip Leslie Hale, J. Alden Weir, and Robert Vonnah. There he began producing paintings that appear to have been influenced by his contact with the work of Thomas Eakins, Thomas Anshutz, and Daniel Garber.
He served in the First World War, enlisting in the Bellefonte Cavalry Troop in September, 1917. After training at Camp Hancock in Georgia, he was sent in May 1918 to England and then to France, where he served with the 28th Division as a member of the sanitary unit. He was discharged from the Army in March of 1919.
After the war he returned to Bellefonte, and from 1924 to 1930 worked as a lime inspector at the American Lime and Stone Company. In 1930 he had one work, Our Back Yard, accepted in the Twenty-Eighth Annual Philadelphia Watercolor Society Exhibition. In the 1930s, Valentine's paintings began to show the influence of the French Post-Impressionist painters Paul Gauguin and Paul Cézanne.
Shelly Grunder, whose master's thesis is the only published work on the artist, writes: Valentine painted landscapes with a concern for retaining the solidity of objects while using abstract shapes and forms. Like Cézanne, he uses trees as compositional devices to screen what lies behind...Valentine's strong purple shadows, flat areas, and interest in abstraction are closer to the style of Gauguin.
Valentine's three paintings, Armour Gap Quarry at Bellefonte, White Rock Cement Kiln, and The Tipple, Bell Mine Quarry, American Lime and Stone Company, Bellefonte, Pa., were painted in 1934-35. They depict limestone quarrying operations in the Bellefonte and Pleasant Gap areas. Each work is executed in the same high-keyed palette of green, grey and purple, and they all reveal Valentines interest in shape and form as established by the use of broad areas of color. Valentine's preparatory sketch for The Tipple, Bell Mine Quarry is one of approximately ten works by Valentine in the collection of the Centre County Library and Historical Museum in Bellefonte. The majority of his paintings remain in the private collections of friends and relatives.
Sources:
Grunder, Shelly Ann. Robert Valentine: A Pennsylvania Post-Impressionist. M.A. thesis, The Pennsylvania State University, 1990.
Falk, Peter Hastings (edit.). Who Was Who In American Art. Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1985.
This document copyright © 1996, Eric John Schruers