Robert Andrew Parker was born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1927. He began drawing while sick at home as a child with tuberculosis.

He worked as an airplane mechanic during WWII. After being honorably discharged from service in 1949, he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, beginning a long and prolific career as a painter and illustrator.

His work was expressive, often witty, with implied narratives that reflected his wry sense of humor. Some of his favorite subjects were war scenes, battleships, airplanes, dogs, monkeys, insects, landscapes, portraits, and lingerie-clad women. Known for his vibrant watercolors and spirited prints, he had a loose and irreverent style of drawing. Print Magazine described him as, “One of the great masters of 20th century illustration.”

In 1952, he was the youngest artist to show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was hired to play the hands of Vincent van Gough in the 1956 film Lust for Life, starring Kirk Douglas. After the film’s release, he was able to work as a full-time artist. Indeed, he described it as “the end of my life as a teacher of the deaf, or as the teacher of annoying teenagers.” He wrote about the experience in an article for American Film magazine, republished by Artnet.com.

Parker went on to create illustrations for the New Yorker, Playboy, Penthouse, Sports Illustrated, Esquire, Time, and Fortune Magazine, which sent him on assignments around the world.

He painted album covers for Columbia Records musicians, from Duke Ellington to Thelonious Monk, and penned scores of alphabet books.

Parker illustrated dozens of children’s books, earning a Schneider Family Book Award and a Randolph Caldecott Medal, among many awards. He taught art at the New York School for the Deaf, Parsons School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design, Geritt Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, and the School of Visual Arts in New York. In his later years, he would lose his sight to macular degeneration.

He passed away at home in 2023, surrounded by his loving family in West Cornwall, Connecticut. (Read more about his life and career in the New York Times.)

His work appears in permanent collections of the Guggenheim, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Parker was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 2004.