About Us

This web site is dedicated to the sale of fine art works by Robert Harvey and those of his late spouse Carolyn Harvey. The art works are located at the family home in Marshfield, Massachusetts. The following is adapted from an article in the Marshfield Mariner.

Robert Harvey Biographical Information

Robert Harvey was born in 1927 in Milton, Massachusetts. His father Leon was a teacher and coach at Thayer Academy in Braintree. Bob was raised in a house on the campus and attended Thayer through graduation in 1945. At Thayer Academy, Harvey illustrated his high school yearbook. He studied art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, then went into the Navy, and returned to art school on the G.I. Bill for returning World War II veterans.

He was married in 1950 to Carolyn Brenan, also a graduate of the Museum School, and settled in Marshfield, where he lived until his death in July, 2015. After a brief stint with a commercial printing operation, he went into business designing and building homes on the South Shore. He taught woodworking at the Silver Lake schools in Kingston, and later taught at the Museum School. He returned to the business of designing and building homes and restorations until retiring in 1992.

As a youth, he liked to work with his hands, both creating art and doing carpentry work. Scarlet fever gave him the inspiration to become an artist when he was in fourth grade. “In those days, you stayed at home in bed for a month, so I learned to draw,” he says, referring to the scarlet fever that kept him home-bound, “I copied the Seven Dwarfs and Mickey Mouse.”

In the shop behind his house that doubles as his studio, Harvey amassed many years’ worth of tools and albums full of photographs he had taken that serve as the subjects for his oil paintings. He also built his own frames for his paintings.

Harvey liked painting on birch plywood in particular. He painted primarily with oils, although he also painted with watercolors. He also enjoyed carving, even making his own line of wooden automobiles.

Harvey tried abstract art for a time, but stopped painting when carpal tunnel syndrome caused difficulty painting. After his surgery, he continued painting with oils and returned to painting as he had before.

After retiring, Harvey started landscape painting because he was inspired by the world outside the homes he had worked on as a building contractor. That’s when he starting taking the photographs stored in the albums in his shop, separated under titles like “sky marsh” and “open marsh.” In particular, cloud formations interest him.