No listing of his teachers or of artists he admires will provide much insight into the work of Robert Winthrop White. Rather than influences in concept, composition, or line his work reflects a neo-classic tradition upheld, and in part founded, by his grandfather, Stand ford White, the architect, and his father, Lawrence Grant White, architect and translator of Dante.

As a beginning sculptor following the second World War his subjects were often spindly forms, agonized in appearance. By the early fifties they had become romantic: powerful plunging horses and proud bulls. Now the romanticism has resolved into a lyricism, and the early sparseness into a purity of line. At thirty-five he appears to be a fully mature artist. The drawings reproduced here are preliminary studies for two life-sized figures, The Ploughman and The Bather, which were exhibited this autumn at the Davis Galleries in New York.

He lives with his wife and three children—Sebastian, Stephanie and Christian—in Saint James, Long Island, quite apart from any school of art or group of artists. He is quietly convinced of his own vision and is by temperament an individualist. The late Carl Mill wrote of him “To me he is the hope for monumental sculpture in the united states.”

 

—B.F.