Joy, Robert

Robert Joy

 (Am. 1910-1993)

A portrait and landscape painter, and known primarily for his portraits of notable persons, Robert Joy was born in Erie, Pennsylvania and spent most of his career in Houston, Texas. At age eighteen, he worked as a self-taught commercial artist in Pennsylvania and studied for two years at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and at New Hope, Pennsylvania with Charles Garner, Jr. In 1932, he and his wife moved to Houston, where he briefly worked for Foley’s Department Store and then became an instructor from 1933 to 1935 and 1937 to 1940 at the Houston Museum School of Art. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army, spending three years in the Philippines. He returned to Houston after the war, and began a fifty-year career as a portrait painter. His subjects were well known local figures as well as prominent persons statewide and nationally. In 1981, he died in Houston, having earlier suffered a stroke that impaired his vision. Exhibition venues included the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; National Exhibition of American Art at Rockefeller Center; Southern States Art League; Museum of Art of the American West, Houston; and Annual Southeast Texas Artists Exhibition. Source: John and Deborah Powers, Texas Painters, Sculptors & Graphic Artists