Artists

Joseph Raffael was an American contemporary realist painter celebrated for his monumental watercolors that immerse viewers in dazzling explorations of nature, color, and spirit. Born in Brooklyn, New York, to Sicilian and Swiss-Irish parents, Raffael began drawing at age seven and studied at the Brooklyn Museum during high school. He attended Cooper Union (1953–54), received a summer fellowship to study with Josef Albers at Yale (1954), and earned his BFA from Yale School of Art in 1956. In 1958, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Florence and Rome, where he began creating vibrantly colored watercolors of flowers.

After his first New York solo exhibition at the d’Arcy Galleries in 1963, Raffael received critical acclaim, leading to a 1965 show at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery and teaching appointments at UC Davis, the School of Visual Arts (NY), UC Berkeley, and California State University, Sacramento. In 1972, inspired by photographs of rivers taken by painter William Allan, he began his celebrated “water paintings.” The following year, Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes profiled him in A Slice of the River, praising his “tender virtuosity without parallel in other American figurative painting today.”

Raffael’s luminous compositions, drawn from flowers, fish, rivers, and gardens, balance serenity with exuberance, inviting contemplation while revealing a profusion of detail. Deeply personal, his work often incorporated themes of spirituality and meditation, particularly after the loss of his son in 1980 and through his long relationship with his wife and muse, Lannis Wood Raffael, with whom he moved to the South of France in 1986. Following her passing in 2019, he created his elegiac Elegy series of flower paintings, describing her as integral to his process.

Throughout his career, Raffael’s paintings appeared on the covers of Watercolor Magic and The Artist’s Magazine and were the subject of the 2018 book Talking Beauty: A Conversation Between Joseph Raffael and David Pagel. In 2016, he shifted from large-format canvases to smaller, intimate works, continuing his lifelong dialogue with beauty, nature, and mystery.

Raffael’s art is represented in major collections worldwide, including the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York, which served as his longtime representative.