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EDUCATION
Robert Franklin Gates was born October 6, 1906, in Detroit, Michigan. We know about his life as a young artist due to handwritten documents from 1936 now accessible in the Smithsonian. Institution's Archives of American Art. In these documents, we learn that he could not recall a time when he was not drawing or painting. He did remember spending summers at a cottage visiting his grandparents on the St. Clair River above Detroit where many Detroit artists would come to escape the city.
I was given a little paint box and used to go sketching with them. They were all amused by my imitating them, but John Morse and Joe Gies began giving me instruction. Joe Gies... was an American who had studied in Paris with Bouguereau... Then, and up until the time of his death as an old man, he wore a black hat, flowing tie, and the pointed beard that he acquired in his youth in Paris. He was one of the pioneers of art in Detroit.
In high school, Gates took all the art classes he could and then "ran away," becoming a cook on a sand barge on the Great Lakes, which,
as he would note, "led to my being sent to military school." After graduating, Gates then attended the Detroit School of Arts and Crafts for one year before leaving "with the idea that an artist had to travel and see the world before he could really amount to much." His handwritten descriptions of those travels are a gift to all young artists.
I was selling shoes to pay my expenses and in the first town I hit I sold five pairs in a garage. I was arrested and escorted to the edge of town when I tried to sell a pair to the mayor who owned the only shoe store in town. I went to a dance that night and sold 16 pair to the men when they came out to smoke. Most of my sales were made in pool rooms and hamburger joints. I sold 29 pairs in two hours in an all-night restaurant. I would make enough in a few days to be able to sketch for a week or so without working.
Returning from his adventures, Gates talked his father into sending him to New York City to attend the Art Students League in 1929. There, among other classes, he studied anatomy with George Brandt Bridgman. According to accounts from other students who worked with this mentor:
Bridgman, constantly inebriated and chewing on a large black cigar, would rail at his students about the importance of mastering anatomy: "Don't think color's going to do you any good. Or lovely compositions. You can't paint a house until it's built."
Gates stayed one year at the Art Students League before leaving for Washington, DC, to attend the Phillips Gallery Art School. He always felt he had benefited from studying with Bridgman, writing somewhat tongue in cheek, "I learned considerable about anatomy that year, and it has stood me in good stead. I resisted Bridgeman's artistic influence as best I could." |