Decker, Robert Melvin

Between 1883 and 1885 Decker worked out of a studio at 191 Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights, New York. From 1885 he also owned a studio at Lake George, The Hague, in the Adirondacks, New York. It was a lovely two-story building on a terrace eighty feet above the lake. Verandas surrounded the house and its windows looked out onto wonderful views of the lake, the woods, the hills and the mountains, and it was this beauty that inspired most of his paintings.From this time on Decker seemed to have been considered an artist of some achievement. He worked and exhibited regularly at one studio or another, spending part of the year in Brooklyn Heights, and the rest at Lake George. He was a member of the Brooklyn Art Club, a club open only to professional artists, and first exhibited his paintings at their exhibition in 1889. He enjoyed consistent gratifying sales and critical praise, especially from the Brooklyn newspapers. Among his patrons was Mrs. F.O. French, the mother of Mrs. Alfred Vanderbilt, and she purchased one of his finest works, ‘ Autumn’.

Robert Decker was known to have exhibited at the following: Meyers Fine Art Gallery, University at Plattsburgh; Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, N.Y.; Montauk Club, Long Island; Pittsburgh Athletic Club; Williams and Everett, Boston; Gillespies, Pittsburgh; Helman-Taylor Galleries, Cleveland; Hillside House, Adirondacks.

An early article by an art critic from the ‘New York Herald’ describes Decker’s paintings as ‘notable examples of art subordinated to nature, as all true art should be…’ and goes on to refer to specific winter scenes that he viewed and enjoyed. Another ‘N.Y. Herald’ critic once stated ‘there are few whose love of nature is more intense than Mr. Decker’s’ and that the way Decker manages with his art to convey nature’s movement and moods in his snow scenes leaves ‘the observer spellbound’. His winter themes were admired for their simplicity, and for their power to concentrate the viewer’s attention, for example as they might when regarding one of his paintings of the rising of a hilly road, buried in deep, soft, dry snow. Decker was particularly talented with small canvases, and found favor with many critics because his works were ‘painted for all time’, not following a whim or school of art, but with truthful semblance of nature.

At the age of thirty-seven, Decker married Emma Haner, a wealthy woman, who was then twenty-eight. Theirs was not a happy marriage, although they remained together. Emma died at the age of 84, having survived Robert by nineteen years.