Robert Riggs

Robert Riggs was born in 1896 in Decatur, Illinois; no source located gives an exact day or month of birth. He began his art studies at James Millikin University in Decatur before winning a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York, where he studied from about 1915 to 1917. His training was interrupted by World War I, during which he served with an Army medical unit in France after training as a hospital orderly. After the Armistice he remained in Paris for roughly six months of further study at the Academie Julian.

Riggs settled in Philadelphia, where he worked for decades as a commercial illustrator, most notably for the advertising agency N. W. Ayer & Son, and as a magazine illustrator for The Saturday Evening Post, Fortune, and Life. He became known for lithographs and paintings of boxing matches, circus performers, and hospital and psychiatric wards, rendered with a muscular, high-contrast realism. His 1938 painting The Brown Bomber, a depiction of the boxer Joe Louis, helped bring him election to the National Academy of Design in 1946, the same year the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts gave him a solo exhibition. He taught at the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts) from 1961 to 1963. Robert Riggs died in 1970 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; no source located gives an exact day or month of death.

During his working life, Riggs was recognized primarily as an illustrator of exceptional technical force. Illustration historian Walt Reed has written that Riggs received the Gold Medal for Excellence from the New York Art Directors Club for ten consecutive years and won many additional awards, and he was later elected to the Society of Illustrators' Hall of Fame, though the exact years of these honors are not documented in available sources. The Woodmere Art Museum describes him as one of the most successful American printmakers of the 1930s and 1940s, noting that he fell into relative obscurity after 1950 despite the earlier acclaim. His subsequent institutional rehabilitation has come largely through museum collecting and survey exhibitions, particularly a series of Whitney Museum group shows from the 1930s through the 2011 exhibition Breaking Ground: The Whitney's Founding Collection, which placed his hospital and boxing scenes within the broader story of American realism.

Robert Riggs's auction history is sparse and only partially documented. The most specific figure available is a report that his 1938 painting The Brown Bomber sold at auction for USD 250,000 in 1999, a figure cited by Artsy; the auction house, sale location, and exact date are not stated in any source found and should be treated as unconfirmed pending further documentation. Separately, an Antiques Roadshow appraisal placed the value of a Saturday Evening Post illustration from around 1951 near USD 277,000; that figure is a televised appraisal estimate, not a recorded sale, and should not be read as an auction result. Riggs has no formal gallery or estate representation as of this writing. His lithographs and paintings circulate mainly through specialist American-print dealers, including The Old Print Shop, Paramour Fine Arts, and RoGallery, which regularly offer his work at print fairs.

Robert Riggs has no catalogue raisonne and no current gallery or estate representation, so provenance research depends on museum accession records, period exhibition catalogues, and the inventories of specialist print dealers. Public auction data for his work is thin and the one widely cited high sale, a reported USD 250,000 for The Brown Bomber in 1999, lacks a confirmed auction house or exact date, so it should be treated as a data point rather than a benchmark. Collectors should also be careful to distinguish this artist, the Decatur-born illustrator and painter of 1896 to 1970, from at least three other people named Robert Riggs or Robert Rigg who appear in public records but have no connection to the fine-art market.