Master Outdoor Painters
Robert Emmett Owen

Robert Emmett Owen was born in North Adams, Massachusetts in 1878.   He was raised by his single mother. His father had left before Owen was born. Owen showed an interest in art from an early age, drawing and painting in watercolor.  He dropped out of High School to financially help his mother by working in a local stationary store.

In 1897, a store customer sent some of Owens drawings to Life Magazine.  The pictures were published, thus starting his illustration career.  The next year, Owen won a scholarship to The Eric Pape School of Art in Boston. He attended classes for two years, supporting himself as a comic strip artist and illustrator for the Boston Globe.  He later moved to New York, determined to work as an illustrator. Over the next ten years, Owen illustrated for most of the successful publications in the country, including Scribner, Century Publishing, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan and Life Magazine.  Owen specialized in landscapes and architecture in pen and ink.

Owen married in 1903 and by 1910 had saved enough money to begin his career as a landscape painter. That year, he moved to Bagnall near Stamford, Connecticut.  Owen began associating with Frederick Mulhaupt and studying with Leonard Ochtman.  Owen joined the Greenwich Society of Artists and was a member of the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts.

In 1919, a series of commissions gave him the means to return to New York where he once again worked as an illustrator.  In 1923, he opened a gallery devoted to his landscapes in New York.  He moved to larger spaces two times to accommodate his success.  Owen’s patrons included some of the Rockefeller family and wealthy politicians. His New England landscapes were praised for their rugged truth.

Owen owned a gallery until 1941.  After the start of World War II, he closed it and moved to New Rochelle, New York.  He became Artist in Residence at the Thomas Paine Memorial Museum.  Robert Emmett Owen died in New Rochelle in 1957.