R. H. Ives Gammell

R. H. Ives Gammell
Born	1883 Providence, Rhode Island
Died	1981 Williamstown, Massachusetts
Nationality	American
Education	School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Académie Julian, William McGregor Paxton
Known for	Painting
Notable work	The Hound of Heaven (1956)
Movement	Classical Realism

Robert Hale Ives Gammell (1893 – 1981) was an American artist best known for his sequence of paintings based on Francis Thompson's poem "The Hound of Heaven". Gammell painted symbolic images that reflected his study of literature, mythology, psychology, and religion.

Gammell was born into a wealthy family in Providence, Rhode Island and attended Groton prep school. He spent much time alone drawing, and by his teens expressed his desire to pursue art. He went to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where his teachers included Edmund C. Tarbell, Joseph DeCamp, and Philip Leslie Hale, all members of the Boston School of painters. He went to the Académie Julian in Paris, but his studies were interrupted by World War I, during which he served with the U.S. military.

Returning to Boston, Gammell painted murals, portraits, and landscapes. He aspired to more imaginative subjects, but he felt restricted by what he considered his inferior drawing and compositional skills. He apprenticed to painter and teacher William McGregor Paxton, also of the Boston School, who was considered an expert in these skills. Paxton had been a student of the French academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, who was himself a student of Paul Delaroche.

In the 1930s Gammell's skill caught up with his ambition. Unlike many of his Boston School peers, he was less interested in portraits and landscapes than in symbolic and mythological images. Although the decade of the 1930s had been his most productive, it ended in a mental breakdown.

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