Portrait of Mrs. Robert Henri

Robert Henri, 1865–1929

Robert Henri studied at both the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Though Thomas Eakins was no longer teaching at the Academy when Henri arrived, Eakins was immensely influential for Henri, who regarded him as the superior portrait painter in the United States and followed Eakins’s bluntly realist style.

This painting of Robert Henri’s second wife, Marjorie Organ Henri, was given by the artist to Alice Klauber, who studied with Henri in Spain in 1907. Klauber invited Henri to San Diego in 1914, and he assisted her with the organization of an exhibition of American painting for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition, which was held in what became Balboa Park. The exhibition brought the work of George Bellows, William Glackens, Childe Hassam, John Sloan, and Henri to San Diego.

View a discussion on Portrait of Mrs. Robert Henri by Dr. Amy Galpin, Associate Curator, Art of the Americas and Lucy Eron, Museum Educator.