Robert Cole Caples is an enigmatic man. Seldom photographed, a lover of privacy: he became one of Nevada’s best-loved artists.
By Hank Nuwer (1973)
Much of the information available on Caples exists
preserved in an intriguing essay by writer Walter Van Tilburg Clark entitled “On Learning to Look: A Note on the Working Life of Robert Cole Caples.”
Clark was particularly qualified to write on Caples. The two were fast friends from the time Caples came to Reno at age 16. In fact, in Walter Clark’s highly autobiographical The
City of Trembling Leaves, Caples appears as the character Lawrence Black, an idealistic artist.
Caples was born in 1908 in New York City in a brownstone house Clark said possessed “a
high, steep flight of steps leading up to a veiled, forbidding door, with tall, veiled windows
through which the dim, city light filtered in, making deep shadows out of which rose the soft
gleams of polished furniture, glass, silver, brass, gilt-stamped book-backs.”
As a boy, according to Clark, the artist had a strong desire to become educated, though
like Huck Finn, he possessed an even stronger aversion to school.
Often he would play truant, retiring to a small cubbyhole .with a single window under the brownstone house’s
steps, a volume of Stevenson or Dickens awaiting him.
Caples’ father, a physician, and his mother, a Columbia University instructor, reacted to the boy’s sub-par report cards
by sending him first to the National Academy of Design and then to the Art Students’
League.
Both experiences were failures; Caples remarked once that he even had trouble spelling the name of the second institution.
Consequently, in 1924, the youth was sent to Reno
to live with his now divorced father.
Exchanging a world where fish live in lakes instead of Fulton’s Fish Market in New York, Caples
responded positively to Nevada’s rugged landscape, history, and people. But he still
disliked school and he struggled at the Santa
Barbara Community Arts program.
Athletic, Caples liked swatting tennis balls
across the nets at Wingfield Park with young Walter Clark, then a Nevada-Reno undergraduate whose father served as president of the university.
In 1928 Caples set up his first studio and began doing a series of portraits. Caples turned to Pyramid Lake and the desert for the comfort his paints couldn’t give
him in times of personal depression.
The few paintings he did were “moody allegories,” according to Clark, who described the artist as a young manic depressive in his novel City of Trembling Leaves.
Caples in 1930 discovered that the crumbling houses of Virginia City introduced him to a world of art and the world of outdoor beauty. Caples began a series of Native American portraits, a choice that has rewarded him with much of his best work. His
Indian portraits won him an appointment with the Federal Arts Project during the Great Depression under President Herbert Hoover’s administration.
The F.A.P. provided
him a chance to study etching and print-making with William Stanley Haytor, and painting
with the academic artist Frederick Taubes.
These years Caples calls the “biggest adventure of all. [I] Had terrific times making
paints building own studio, rough-firing pottery; built etching press out of an old-fashioned
washing wringer made dyes out of boiled fruits and vegetables, scraped soot from studio
chimney to make rich black. Ground up colored clays, ran leaves and flowers through
washing wringer.” (Clark essay.)
World War II intervened and Caples joined the Navy. He listed his occupation
as painter and the Navy obliged. Only instead of porttraits, he painted latrine walls and benches.
At war’s end the Navy moved him up to drawing maps. The work did not aid Caples’
career. On the contrary, he mustered out in a more depressed state than ever. On the GI Bill
he turned to the Art League once more, and this time, he responded to the training.
Caples returned to Reno but spent the first six weeks at St. Mary’s Hospital. A tropical strep virus that had waylaid him in the
service flared up once again, and it was an emaciated veteran who checked out of the out
patient clinic after weeks of nothing but intravenous feedings.
After Caples regained his health, he spent a couple of years at art school in San
Francisco and eventually returned to Nevada to paint at his cabin near the Carson Hot Springs.
Caples’ paintings are symbolic, relying on the turtle, the fish, and the lizard to communicate his meanings.
Like the Lawrence Black of Clark’s City of Trembling Leaves, Caples’ personal life has been stormy.
The artist now lives with his fifth wife, Rosemary Caples, in the Connecticut Berkshires in a house he nicknamed
Turtle Hill.
Hank Nuwer wrote this column in 1973 for the Nevada-Reno student newspaper Sagebrush. The accompanying painting “Tribal elder” by Caples ran in the Sagebrush courtesy of the Nevada State Museum. Caples was born in 1908 and died Nov. 17, 1979.