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Richard H. Bassett was born February 21, 1900 on the campus of Trinity College (now Duke University) in Durham, North Carolina. He was the only son of John Spencer Bassett, head of the history department at the college. In the winter of 1906 the family moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, where the elder Bassett had become head of the history department at Smith College. Although his father died in 1928, Northampton and the family house there remained a stable point in a peripatetic life until its sale in 1959.

In the Spring of 1911, Bassett moved with his mother, Jessie Lewellin Bassett, to Vevey, Switzerland where he was enrolled in private school and began studies with the Swiss painter, Henri Edouard Bercher, a graduate of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Geneva and a frequent exhibitor of landscapes at the Suisse Salon des Beaux-Arts. In 1912 they moved to Paris where twelve-year-old Richard Bassett impressed the British painter Percyval Tudor-Hart with the fact that he had already learned to draw better than many of Tudor-Hart’s much older students. Bassett, therefore, was invited to enter the academy of this rebellious student of Gerome’s at 69 Rue d’Assas in Montparnasse. Among Tudor-Hart’s other students were New Zealand-born Owen Merton and the Englishman James Wood.

The return to Northampton in 1913 was difficult for a boy who had been exposed to the ways of Paris. Although he did well in his studies, Bassett was ridiculed for his European clothes and European ways. In 1914 he entered Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Although he was to graduate with high honors in 1916, the Headmaster fired Bassett as editor of the monthly magazine because of a careless reference to morals in a story. His European experiences seem to have given him a more sophisticated outlook by his mid-teens than either his schoolmates or his American teachers.

Upon entering Harvard College in the fall of 1916, he discovered in the art department aesthetes of the highest level of sophistication in the painter Martin Mower and Professor Denman Ross. There he spent three happy years painting under Mower and studying Ross’s Theory. In 1918 he donned a uniform and entered the United States Army, but was stationed in Harvard Yard. For his fourth year at Harvard, Bassett returned to his studies with Tudor-Hart who had moved his academy to London, and Bassett returned to Harvard in 1920 only long enough to receive his B.A. cum laude. Returning to London he continued to study with Tudor-Hart, who Bassett called “difficult but brilliant” until 1923. Tudor-Hart would often suspend school for a month or so to travel, and Bassett took these opportunities to return to Paris and to study at the Academie Colarossi and especially the Grande Chaumiere. He would return to the latter many times throughout his career.

Bassett moved to Florence in 1924, which resulted in, as he noted, “two years of extreme frustration where I produced nothing of consequence in spite of hard work.” He moved in the English and American circles of artists, critics and literati in Florence, often enjoying an invitation for Sunday dinner at I Tatti with Bernard Berenson and his wife. He also dined often with Norman Douglas, the brilliant author of “Old Calabria” and “South Wind.”

After returning to Northampton in 1926, Bassett established a studio in New York and painted at the Mountain Lake Club in Florida where he worked as an independent mural painter and as an assistant to the mural painter Allyn Cox. During this period Bassett decorated rooms and facades of elaborate houses in New York, Florida, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.

Bassett returned to the family house in Northampton in 1932 where he continued his work in landscape studies, which culminated in an exhibition at Feragil Galleries in New York City in 1936. During this period Bassett studied drawing with George Bridgman at the Art Students League in New York. In 1937, after his marriage to Henrietta Durant of Charleston, South Carolina, Bassett and his new wife moved to Boston, where he had five one-man shows in and around Newbury Street in the next few years, three of them in the prestigious Grace Horne Gallery. During this period he was living at Champney Place on Beacon Hill. This was a productive time for paintings of Boston, Charlestown, Cambridge, Chelsea and East Boston which explored the bleak vistas of the urban American Scene in the latter years of the Depression; but the economic and artistic climate did not return great financial rewards.

Eleuthera in the Bahamas where Bassett was traveling as a dye expert for shell jewelry in 1941 yielded, in addition to some much needed money, the surprise that America was at war. In the fall of 1942 he was in the Walworth factory in South Boston when he was offered a Captaincy in the Army Specialist Corps as an Intelligence Officer since he was able to speak French and Italian. By 1942 Bassett was in Casablanca with the army, first with the Army Engineers and then as an Army Real Estate Officer for the State of Morocco. During the War, in 1943, Bassett’s son Edward was born. In February 1945 he took advantage of an “early out” program and left the Army before the end of the War.

Through the introduction of friends, Bassett was invited in 1945 to found and head the art department at Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts. Besides courses in drawing and painting he also taught art history until his retirement twenty years later. Through his association with Milton Academy he became interested in secondary school education and served as Chairman for the Art Committee of the National Association of Independent Schools. In 1969 Bassett served as editor and an author of a full-length text for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, along with other distinguished collaborators, on the teaching of art in school systems.

The strain of teaching, writing and painting took its toll on his marriage, which ended in divorce in 1958. The next year he sold the Northampton house. In 1966 Bassett married Claire Fuller Albright and lived happily in Brookline, Massachusetts and Milton until his second wife’s death in 1990. In 1992 Bassett visited Paris again on his own and took a stool at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere. He noted that although the fees for sitting in on the life class had gone up over twenty times since he had first taken his seat there in the 1910s he still felt “at home.” In October Bassett married Eleanor Scott and lived with her in Milton, Massachusetts until his death on February 6, 1995. His was a life in art that has truly spanned the twentieth century and has touched many of the most major figures and movements in the art world on both sides of the Atlantic.