Robert Seyffert

Robert Seyffert has been a painter and educator all his life. He was born in Bryn Mawr, PA in 1952 and two years later his family moved to Lima, Peru. He grew up in Peru until returning to the US in 1963 when his father began teaching at St. Andrews School in Delaware. He first studied art at St. Andrews with his mother and he became the student photographer for the school. Intending on becoming a photojournalist he considered photography schools for college but instead went to MICA, earning his BFA at the Maryland Institute in 1975. Seyffert went on to earn his MFA at the Parsons School of Design and opened a studio in Mt. Vernon neighborhood in Baltimore where he first began painting cityscapes. In a profile in American Artist magazine, he explained the appeal of both natural and urban scenes. “Whether it’s a big tree or a 1965 Pontiac,” Seyffert said, “there’s something about the light hitting the subject that excites me, and that’s what I paint. . . . I’m trying to get the sensation created by the thing I’m looking at, and not just copying it” (Howell, 2003). Seyffert’s cityscapes, depicting the streets of New York from the 1990’s and Baltimore in the 1980s and feature vintage automobiles and are frequently compared to the works of Edward Hooper . Seyffert now teaches at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in the Bronx and has taught drawing and painting at the Art Students League, Washington Studio School, Washington, D.C., Baltimore School for the Arts and Johns Hopkins University. In 2019 he was awarded the Poe Award by the Bronx Historical Society for his contribution to the arts. From 2007-2019 he maintained a studio in the Bronx’s historic American Banknote Building. For 15 years he directed Alfred and Trafford Klots Residency Program in Rochefort-en-Terre, Morbihan, France. Among Seyffert’s other awards are a first prize from the National Arts Club, a Helena Rubinstein Grant from the Parsons School of Design, a Greenshields Fellowship, and a Yale at Norfolk Summer School Fellowship. Seyffert’s work is in many institutional and private collections, including his portrait of James Michener in the National Portrait Gallery, a portrait of Clarence Mitchell in the Clarence Mitchell Courthouse in Baltimore, MD and one of Toni Morrison at the National Arts Club. Seyffert regularly exhibited at the Houston North Gallery in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia and at the Holman Gallery in New York’s lower east side. The past several years he has shown in Hoboken, NJ, Marion MA and Chester, Nova Scotia and at the National Arts Club in 2020 with a show of dawn plein air works of New York City. From 1999-2002 the exhibition, Leopold, Richard, and Robert Seyffert: Three Generations of Artistic Visions, featuring more than 100 paintings by Seyffert, his uncle, and his grandfather, was shown in Baltimore, New York’s Salmagundi Club and Washington, DC. His work’s style is “painterly realism” – work that is lifelike but not photographic based on observational painting and the use of manipulating and layering oil paint. Craft and subject matter have dominated his art where his subjects are chosen from the situations, people and places he has lived. While painting from a studio he had in Chelsea in 2000 he ironically painted a car from the set of Ed Harris’s movie “Pollock” that led him to painting tragic cars from artists’ lives. Now he works in Spanish Harlem. robertseyffert.com/