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Stone Roberts is not being immodest when he says, “People generally want a painting of mine first. Then they want to be in it.” Coveted by collectors and included in numerous museums, the Yale- and Tyler School of Art–trained artist, 59, is best known for his lapidary still lifes, luminous street scenes, and intricate, moody interiors with figures. Betsey, his wife of 36 years, is a frequent model (“a great beauty,” Roberts says), as are friends and neighbors in the Beaux-Arts Belnord building on the Upper West Side and in Stonington, Connecticut, the couple’s weekend retreat. While Roberts’s figurative paintings are portraits of sorts, he only occasionally does portrait commissions by special request.
One of his first, Roberts says, was for Thomas McNamee, the author and environmentalist, and his wife, Louise. That portrait’s skillful serenity and balanced precision evoke the Dutch masters Roberts admires: Louise, wearing a striking red business suit, is absorbed in some papers beside her on the floor, while her husband peers intently at a computer monitor on the bureau behind her. When the McNamees divorced, the artist retitled the canvas Portrait of a Marriage, emphasizing the scene’s undercurrent of detachment.
Roberts works on a large scale but meticulously, creating Renaissance-style cartoons in ink and chalk for his paintings, incorporating “a formal idea and usually a mythical and psychological element,” he says. Perhaps because his work is so full of allusions, it tends to appeal to literary-minded collectors such as Carll Tucker, a retired magazine and newspaper publisher now active in philanthropy, and biographer and cultural patron Barbara Goldsmith, who commissioned Roberts to paint her grandchildren. Roberts was an obvious choice to do the portrait of the William A.V. Cecil family, descendants of George Washington Vanderbilt who live near the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. A native of Asheville, Roberts has been a friend of the family since he was a boy. Commissioned for the centenary of the Gilded Age landmark, in 1995, the painting lavishly presents the family in a great room with sweeping views of the estate out the windows; on the wall behind the group is Seymour Joseph Guy’s famous 1873 portrait of the original owner and his brood. Roberts notes that “the little boy in the Guy painting is William Cecil’s grandfather.” The two works now hang on opposite walls in the Biltmore’s sitting room. The trick, Roberts says, “was to capture people who are very private in a painting that has a public function. The funny thing about this one was I had to go back and add a child and a pram, because the family kept getting bigger.”