One of the most idiosyncratic and under-recognized artists of post-War American art, Robert Hamilton (1917-2004) taught painting and drawing at the Rhode Island School of Design for thirty-four years. Yvonne Jacquette, Richard Merkin, George Lloyd, and Dean Richardson were some of his many students. For Hamilton, who flew over 100 missions in WW II as a P-47 fighter pilot, earning him the Distinguished Flying Cross, the picture plane was a stage for depicting invented narratives brimming with humor, pathos, and an unquenchable zest for life. His experiences during the war profoundly influenced the imagery in his paintings, which often feature figures from history and from art, bon vivant characters and animals, blithely enjoying life and defying the inevitability of death.

Trained academically at RISD as an undergraduate before the War, Hamilton studied under John Robinson Frazier, whom he called "one great teacher." Frazier, he said, "taught Eakins," and Hamilton's early paintings reveal his adeptness at figurative realism. Returning from Europe after the War, Hamilton was recruited to teach at the college beginning in 1948. Coming of age aesthetically at the height of Abstract Expressionism, Hamilton was keenly aware of the movement and while he embraced its gestural tenets, "I couldn't let go of certain objectives, like a consistent light, and objectives like balance of volumes, balance of form, and negative space." He was drawn instead to the figurative abstraction of Francis Bacon, who was "the truest improvisor in my view." He also admired the work of Max Beckmann, "the absolute top influence," whose paintings taught him "there's nothing in the world that brings color to life like a big whack of black next to it...black is what makes his color so delicious, so juicy, so wonderful."

During the 1950s and 60s, Hamilton exhibited widely at galleries and museums in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New York, and in 1974, he was artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome. By this time, he had established a particular, individualistic method of painting that he principally followed for the remainder of his career. "...I found a system of putting down a lot of exciting abstract expressionist paint and covering it up with a coat of lamp black, and then, uncovering, and when I uncovered it, after a while, it looked like something." Using the side of his hand as a squeegee, followed by brushes, and sometimes paper towels to imprint a delicate pattern, Hamilton coaxed figures, settings, and action out of the blackness and the recesses of his consciousness.