Name

Robert Emerson Curtis

Culture

Australian | English

Gender

Male

Birth date

4 October 1898

Birth place

Croydon, England View on map Close map

Death date

23 March 1996

Death Place

Sydney, New South Wales, Australia View on map Close map

Movements

Australia from 1914; USA 1922-28; New Zealand, Central America, USA, Europe, Asia 1969-70

Occupations

Artist (commercial) | Artist (mural) | Artist (painter) | Cartoonist | Drawer | Illustrator | Printmaker | Writer

Summary

Worked: Australia (NSW), United States of America. Etchings, Lithographs, Woodcuts

NGA IRN

22734

Context

Australia

Biography

Robert Emerson Curtis

Robert Emerson Curtis was born in Croydon, England, in 1898 and migrated to Australia in 1914. He trained as a commercial artist specialising in newspaper and magazine illustrations.

In 1922, accompanied by a friend, the cinematographer Charles Chauvel he travelled to the USA. It was while living in San Francisco that he produced his first prints —small etchings of Alcatraz and boats in the harbour.

Upon moving to Chicago in 1925 Emerson Curtis was impressed with the quality of the architecture and the vitality of the buildings being erected in that city. His style of illustration for papers and magazines was influenced by Joseph Pennell, an American lithographer, etcher and illustrator, who embraced the ‘Wonders of Man’ be they buildings, bridges or great canals.

Emerson Curtis’s woodcuts and etchings of the 1920s reflect Pennell’s influence but they also have some of the gritty realism which is associated with the American ‘Ash can school’.

In 1928 Emerson Curtis returned to Sydney where he produced a series of lithographs on the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Emerson Curtis continued to work in a documentary mode; a late project was recording the building of the Sydney Opera House. Emerson Curtis died in 1996.

© Australianprints, 2001

Last Updated

24 Jun 2021