A painter of modernist portraits, Robert Vickrey has created many paintings that appeared on the cover of "Time" magazine and has written extensively on his methods of using tempera. He has frequently been called an American Surrealist or Magic Realist and uses symbolism extensively. Sometimes over their hearts, his portrait figures have targets, symbolizing the horrors and violence of war.

He was born in New York City, attended Wesleyan University and, in the 1940s, the Yale School of Fine Arts where he received his B.A. in 1947 and later a B.F.A. He also studied at the Art Students League of New York with Victoria Huntley, Reginald Marsh and Kenneth Hayes Miller.

He learned the technique of tempera painting from Lewis York, a protege of Daniel Thompson, Jr. who wrote the textbook for the tempera class at the Yale School of Fine Art. In 1950, Vickrey worked with Josef Albers at Yale.

Between 1952 and 1963, Vickrey was in nine annual exhibitions of the Whitney Museum and from 1957 to 1968, had 78 works published on "Time" magazine covers.

His work is in numerous museums including the National Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian, the National Academy of Design, the Brooklyn Museum, the Butler Institute of American Art, the Chrysler Museum, and the Corcoran Collection.

Biography courtesy of www.askart.com.

Jack Kramer was born in 1923 in Lynn, Massachusetts. When he was ten, his father’s sudden death spurred him, his mother and his grandmother to move to Roxbury, a neighborhood filled with other first-generation Jews from Russia. In 1938, he attended the Vocational High School Art Classes sponsored by the Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston School Committee, and three years later he entered the School of the Museum of Fine Arts to study under Karl Zerbe. His education was interrupted by his service in the U.S. Army during World War II.

In 1949, after the war, he completed his studies at the Museum School, after which he received the Albert H. Whitin Traveling Scholarship. This award allowed him to study in England and Europe from 1950-53, where he attended the University of Reading in England, the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris, France and the Instituto Statale Del’Art in Florence, Italy. He resumed his studies in the U.S at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1953-4 where he received his Bachelor of Arts. He spent his summers from 1955-8 serving as an assistant to renowned painter Oskar Kokoschka at the School of Vision in Salzburg, Austria.

From 1957 until his death in December of 1983, he was a member of the faculty at Boston University School of Visual Arts, where he taught drawing and painting. He was something of a rebel in an age of abstraction, as he believed deeply in the discipline of drawing. In 1972, he wrote the highly esteemed “Human Anatomy and Figure Drawing,” published by Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, NY.

Kramer’s work has been featured in one-man shows at the Marblehead Art Association (1958); the Carl Siembab Gallery, Boston (1958, 1960, 1961); the Boris Mirski Gallery, Boston (1964, 1966); the Salem Public Library (1973); the Shore Gallery, Boston (1976); the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (1977); and the Kingston Art Gallery (1981).

Group shows include: the National Academy of Design, New York (1956, 1981); Marietta College, Ohio (1958); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (1960, 1961); Boston University (1963, 1966, 1969, 1972, 1974, 1979, 1980); Kunstsalon Wolfberg, Zurich (1969); Helen Bumpus Gallery, Duxbury, MA (1970); the Brockton Art Center (1970); the Brookline Arts Center (1973); the Arts and Science Center, Nashua, NH (1974); Contemporary Artists Gallery, Brookline, MA (1974, 1975); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1977); the Copley Society of Boston (1979); Sidney Hill Country Club, Chestnut Hill, MA (1980); and the Copley Society/Federal Reserve Bank Building, Boston (1980).

In 1981, Kramer was awarded the T.B. Clarke Prize for painting at the National Academy of Design in New York. In 1982, The Copley Society exhibited a collection of his work when he was chosen to be a Copley Master.

Laurence Sisson, a student of Herbert Barnett (1910-1972), is one of America's preeminent realist painters today. Sisson's fluid and articulate style is his own unique and bold way of expressing his response to a certain segment of nature. Sisson lived in Maine for over ten years, and the powerful landscapes and seascapes provided him with an endless source of inspiration and subject matter. Beneath each of these naturalistic scenes lies an implicit abstract pattern, which contributes to the cohesiveness of the whole.

Sisson was born in Boston in 1928 and studied at the Worcester Museum School and then at the Yale Summer School with a scholarship. He had his first one-man show at the Vose Galleries, Boston in 1951 at the age of twenty-three. His work is found in the collections of the Albuquerque Museum, Beria College, Bowdoin College, Clark University, Colby College, Columbia Museum of Fine Arts, DeCordova Museum, Dartmouth College, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, New Britain Museum, Portland Museum, Worcester Museum and other public, corporate and private collections. He has received numerous prestigious awards throughout his career.