Robert W. Richards

NOTE: The following article is NSFW and includes images of sex and artistic nudity.

Robert W. Richards was born into a monolingual French-speaking family in Sanford, Maine, an industrial town near the state’s southern border. He began his formal art training at the age of fifteen upon receipt of a scholarship to attend the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. After relocating to New York, Richards began his career as an illustrator, producing work for department stores and cosmetic companies including Clairol, L’Oréal, and Revlon before establishing himself as a fashion illustrator.

During an era when fashion illustration was still executed by hand, before digital photography and the rise of the supermodel, Richards sketched runway models for American publications as a foreign correspondent at both couture and prêt-à-porter shows in London, Paris, and Milan. He continued this work through the late 1970s, collaborating with celebrated fashion houses from Chanel to Zoran. His diverse commercial practice encompassed designing Broadway theater posters, album and record covers for performers including Bob Marley, Lena Horne, Peggy Lee, and Frank Sinatra. He also received celebrity portrait commissions of Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Audrey Hepburn, and Marlon Brando. In ever-varied career, Richards served as a character-design consultant for the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Alongside his work in mainstream fashion and illustration, Richards developed a substantial body of homoerotic art. His drawings appeared in many of the leading American gay-interest publications of the 1970s and 1980s including Mandate, The Advocate, Honcho, Playguy, Torso, Blueboy, and Stallion. Richards worked as correspondent for Manshots, an international review specializing in gay pornography where he reported on prominent performers and filmmakers. Many of his sketches from this time, some produced on the sets of adult films directed by figures such as Joe Gage, were the subject of the exhibition Gods of Erotica at the Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation in 2003.

Robert W. Richards. Untitled (Erotic Illustration for Mandate Magazine), ca. 1980s. Ink and watercolor on paper vellum, mounted on bristol board. Offered in AFTER DARK on 20 August 2026.

Robert W. Richards. Satisfied, 1997. Graphite on paper vellum. Offered in AFTER DARK on 23 April 2026.

Richards' approach to the male figure departed from the heavily muscled beefcake ideal that dominated much early contemporary gay visual culture. In a 2014 interview, he described his preference for elongated, dancer-like physiques: “I like dancers’ bodies: long limbs, long muscles, as opposed to that scrunched-up look with short little muscley arms. It’s not my aesthetic.” [1] Combined with his fashion background, Richard’s skill for rendering clothing, gesture, and anatomy, became a defining characteristic of his erotic body of work. Richards primarily worked in Prismacolor pencil, charcoal and watercolors, with a preference of drawing from live models rather than photographic references.

Richards began exhibiting professionally in 1983 alongside fellow fashion illustrator and erotic artist Richard Rosenfeld at the Basement Gallery, then directed by Charles Leslie. Richards curated a Peter Berlin retrospective in 2006 and Stroke: From Under the Mattress to the Museum at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in 2014, an exhibition showcasing the artistic significance of illustrations published in historic gay magazines. Stroke subsequently travelled to the GLBT Historical Society Museum in San Francisco in 2016.

Following his death in 2019, a retrospective of his erotic art, Incomparable! The Unparalleled Art of Robert W. Richards, was held at SoHo Project Space in Manhattan in January 2024. [2]

Notes

[1] Cameron Keady, interview with Robert W. Richards, “Robert W. Richards: Dreamboys,” Gayletter, no. 1 (October 2014) https://gayletter.com/robert-w-richards-dreamboys

[2] “Incomparable! The Unparalleled Art of Robert W Richards” Exhibition Page. SoHo Project Space. https://www.sohoprojectspace.com/exhibitions/2024/incomparable-the-unparalleled-art-of-robert-w-richards

Contributors

Barry Oliver
Cataloger, LGBTQ+ Art & Material Culture