Untitled (Fisherman's House at River's Edge)
Oil on canvas
20 1/8 x 26 1/8 inches
Circa 1939
Now on view: TJC Gallery, Spartanburg, South Carolina
As Exhibited in: Elevation from Within: The Study of Art at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, 2019–2024, TJC Gallery, Spartanburg, South Carolina, 2019; Richardson Family Art Museum, Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina, 2021; Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, 2022, Florida A&M University, Tallahassee, Florida, 2023, Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland, 2024
Robert Neal benefited greatly from his relationship with Hale Woodruff, the revered artist-educator who oversaw the art department at Atlanta University. A native of Atlanta, Neal started studying under Woodruff as a teenager, presumably when he was enrolled at Atlanta University’s Laboratory School, an experimental preparatory school also attended by Martin Luther King, Jr. According to his widow, Neal “began his studies when he was fifteen, and his lessons cost fifty cents a day. When he was about eighteen, Mr. Woodruff wanted him to enter a big show, but Bob didn’t have the right clothes and couldn’t afford to attend the opening.” Recognizing the talents of his student, Woodruff rented Neal a tuxedo and limousine. The young artist took the first-place prize in the exhibition. It is unclear if he actively pursued or received a degree from the university; in a 1977 oral interview, Neal stated that he spent six years on the Atlanta University campus and worked as a student-teacher under Woodruff as part of a scholarship package.
Neal became Woodruff’s chief assistant on a major project, the Amistad Murals at Talladega College in Alabama. Three of these large-scale canvases, painted in 1939 and 1940, commemorate the uprising aboard the Spanish slave ship. Neal recounted that “Mr. Woodruff did all of the figures. I did all of the background.” Woodruff would later praise Neal’s integral role in the project: “He kept my sketches and equipment in order. He transferred the cartoons to the actual canvas. He posed for all of the hands and figure gestures that appear in the mural. . . . I don't know what I would have done without him.” In his seminal volume Modern Negro Art (1943), James Porter referenced Neal as one who “distinctly bears the mark of Woodruff’s style and methods.”
Neal’s painting style resembles the hard-edge realism and deep chiaroscuro of his mentor’s work at the time of the murals, and several of his works were included in landmark exhibitions centered on the achievements of African American artists. During this same period, Neal was employed by the Works Progress Administration. In the early 1940s, he moved to Dayton, Ohio; little is known about his subsequent life.