For artist Robert Vickrey, Naples has always been a good town. Since Harmon-Meek Gallery began showing his work 20 years ago, he's sold an impressive number of pieces here, many from the mostly tempera paintings he's done in his Sisters of Charity series over the last half century.
But the biggest reward Vickrey, who calls himself a lyrical realist, has received in Naples may be his reintroduction to the woman he's now married to, the former Beverly Bowen. The two had dated in college, while he was attending Yale and she Vassar, but eventually went their separate ways. Vickrey stayed in his native New York City, bucking the New York Abstract Expressionism surge of the 1950s as one of the few realists whose work was still widely accepted; from 1957 to 1968, he completed 78 portraits that appeared on the cover of Time. Over the decades his work has been collected by the Whitney, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, the Butler Institute and the Corcoran, among others.
Beverly, meanwhile, had lived in Chicago with her husband, Ben, before moving to Naples in the 1980s. Wandering into Harmon-Meek one day, she spotted Vickrey's name on a painting and wondered if it could be her old college flame. It was, and the two rekindled a friendship nourished at every Vickrey exhibition opening.
Then Beverly was widowed, and Vickrey became a widower. The two met for a luncheon date, and sparks flew. Married three years now, they divide their time between Naples and Vickrey's longtime Cape Cod home.
Vickrey's latest exhibition, Mostly Nuns, is tied to the recent publication by Ursuline College of the book Robert Vickrey's Nun Paintings: Creatures of the Spirit, and will be on view March 9-15 at Harmon-Meek. The Vickreys, of course, will be there at the opening, in the gallery that helped bring them back together.
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