Robert Vickrey: How to Tell If the Painting of the Nun Is Worth $10,000

Vickrey painted 78 Time covers and became the leading modern practitioner of egg tempera. At auction the medium is everything: a five-inch tempera made $10,625 while a 32-by-48-inch oil failed to sell at a $7,000 estimate. And the worst thing you can do to one is clean it.

SebastianCharles Auctions

There is a painting that turns up in estates with some regularity: a nun in a white winged headdress, seen from behind or with her face turned away, against a blank sunlit wall. Or a child with a balloon, or a bubble, standing on cracked pavement with a shadow far too long for the hour. The surface is dead matte. There is no gloss, no brush ridge, nothing catching the light.

That is a Robert Vickrey, and the flat matte surface is the whole point — and the whole valuation.

Who he was

Robert Remsen Vickrey was born in Manhattan in 1926 and died at his home in Naples, Florida in April 2011, aged eighty-four. Pomfret School, then Wesleyan, then Yale for a BA in 1947, then a year at the Art Students League — where he studied under Reginald Marsh and Kenneth Hayes Miller — and then back to Yale for a BFA in 1950. He learned egg tempera at Yale from Lewis E. York.

He lived in Fairfield, Connecticut, then Orleans on Cape Cod, and finally Naples.

Between 1957 and 1968 he painted roughly 78 covers for Time magazine, including Martin Luther King Jr. as Man of the Year for 1963, on the issue dated 3 January 1964 — the original of which is in the National Portrait Gallery, where a large group of his Time covers ended up after the magazine donated some 800 cover artworks in 1978. (A note for anyone checking: Wikipedia gives his Time cover span as 1942 to 1966. That cannot be right — he was fifteen in 1942 and still at Yale until 1950.)

His work is in the Whitney — The Labyrinth, 1951, the nun-in-mirrors picture that made his name, acquired the following year — the Metropolitan (Corner Bedroom, 1966, egg tempera on Masonite), the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Everson Museum in Syracuse, and the Toledo Museum of Art. His papers are at the Archives of American Art.

He was also an avant-garde filmmaker, and it shows — the compositions owe as much to film noir, Fellini and Hitchcock as to any painter.

Why egg tempera matters so much here

Egg tempera is powdered pigment bound with egg yolk and water. It has to go on a rigid support — a wood panel or Masonite, coated first in gesso — because it will not adhere reliably to anything flexible. It dries fast, dries matte, and cannot be blended wet into wet. The image is built up in thousands of small hatched strokes and thin glazes.

Vickrey did not simply revive the technique; he expanded it, working around its fast drying time by scraping with razor blades, scumbling, stippling, sponging and sandpapering. He wrote the two standard modern texts on it, New Techniques in Egg Tempera (1973) and Robert Vickrey: Artist at Work (1979). His own line: "There are many ways to use egg tempera, not just one."

He belongs to the American tempera revival alongside Andrew Wyeth, Paul Cadmus and George Tooker. The teaching lineages of that revival ran through Yale and the Art Students League, and Vickrey passed through both.

The critical term attached to him is magic realism: nothing fantastical in the picture, just ordinary things rendered with photographic exactness and arranged so the scene reads as unreal or faintly menacing. Vickrey described himself as "anti-romantic" and said his paintings "always convey a sense of danger." Of the nuns — Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, chosen for the abstract shape of their winged cornettes — he said he had started painting them "because I was interested in the abstract shapes," and later that they stood for "something that was too beautiful and fragile to exist in our modern world."

The single most important fact about his market

The temperas clear. The oils, on what we can find, do not.

Look at these, all real published results:

Work · Medium and size · Sale · Result

A five-and-a-half by seven inch egg tempera made the same money as a fourteen by twenty inch one. A thirty-two by forty-eight inch oil could not find a buyer at seven thousand dollars.

Size does not appear to be the driver. Medium does. One passed lot is a thin sample and we would not build a valuation on it alone — but it points the same way as everything dealers report about this artist, and it is the first thing we would check before cataloguing one.

Working range for a good egg tempera: roughly $6,000 to $12,000, with strong examples $10,000–$15,000, and only exceptional pictures above $20,000. Current estimates at Eldred's and Bonhams in 2026 run $5,000–$10,000 for panels in the eight-by-ten to twenty-by-twenty-eight inch range — which is up on where the middle of this market sat a decade ago.

A reported $51,000 record for The Wall at Sotheby's in 2006 circulates on the aggregator sites. We have not been able to corroborate it, so we would use the Bonhams $35,312 as the verified high-water mark.

Prints are a different universe. His signed serigraphs and lithographs — Balloon Dance, The Yellow Dress, Girl Blowing Bubbles, Clown — carry estimates in the low hundreds. Recent examples: $150–$250 and $100–$150. A print is worth on the order of one to three percent of a comparable egg tempera. Which is exactly why misidentification is expensive in both directions.

Is the market rising? Modestly, and narrowly. Tyger, Tyger made $11,050 against a $2,000–4,000 estimate in March 2026 with heavy online bidding. Heritage set its house record in 2023. But the big oil passed in 2024. The honest summary: firm to rising over five years, but selective — the money follows the egg temperas and the signature subjects and is unforgiving of everything else.

One thing we will not tell you, because the data does not support it: that the nuns outperform the children-and-bubbles pictures. The verified nun results run $3,328 to $10,625; the butterfly and animal pictures run $10,000 to $11,050. They overlap, and the sample is far too small and too confounded by size, date and saleroom to call. The nuns are his most identified subject, and dealer demand for them is well documented. That is a different claim from a price premium.

Reading the object

The signature is on the front, and the position is not consistent. Across catalogued lots he signs lower left about as often as lower right. Both "Robert Vickrey" and the abbreviated "R. Vickrey" are authentic — a short signature is not a red flag. He sometimes dated alongside it in two-digit apostrophe form: '88, '90.

Titles are frequently on the verso.

The gallery label on the back is your best dating tool. His dealers, in order:

Dealer · Roughly

(Sources differ by a year or two on several of these, so treat the table as a decade-level guide rather than a precise chronology.)

So a Midtown Galleries label points to a 1950s–70s picture. A Kennedy Galleries label — often with a stock number — points to roughly 1988–93. A Harmon-Meek or Tree's Place label points to a late work. These are real labels observed on real lots, and they are genuinely useful.

Tempera or oil? He worked in both, and adopted alkyd oil in the 1980s — Cops (1988) is oil on canvas laid on board. Never assume a Vickrey is egg tempera. The tells:

And watch for reproductions. Beyond the signed print editions, there are photomechanical reproductions after the paintings — one is catalogued in the trade as a "print after original tempera on Masonite painting, published in 1972." Framed behind glass, a reproduction of a nun or a bubble picture reads convincingly as a painting from ten feet. Look under magnification for a halftone dot or an inkjet rosette, and for a plate or sheet edge.

There is no catalogue raisonné that we can find, and no published authentication committee. The estate maintains robertvickrey.com. The practical due-diligence route is the gallery label and stock number, the Robert Vickrey Papers at the Archives of American Art — 4.3 linear feet of correspondence with galleries and exhibition records, which can confirm a work's history — and Philip Eliasoph's Robert Vickrey: The Magic of Realism for illustrated comparison.

Please do not clean it

This is the part we would most like people to read before they act.

The received wisdom is that aged tempera is inert and takes a gentle cleaning. It does not. Egg yolk is roughly two-thirds lipid by dry weight and behaves like a slow-drying oil; controlled testing against water, ethanol, acetone and isooctane found measurable response in films of every age, including a sixteenth-century painting. The paint layer is thin, brittle and matte, applied in fine hatched passes over a chalk-and-glue gesso ground.

So: no solvent, no water, and no polishing. Even a microfibre cloth removes material, and the matte hatched surface abrades and burnishes irreversibly. Fine crazing, incidentally, is not automatically a sign of abuse — it can be inherent to how rich the egg-to-pigment mix was when the artist laid it down.

Here is why this is not an abstract concern. Grogan's Nun in May 2022 was catalogued with "considerable surface grime" and a few flecks of inpainting visible under ultraviolet — and made $10,625, over its high estimate. The buyers for this artist look at pictures under UV and they read condition reports carefully.

Grime is forgiven. Abrasion and overcleaning are not. A dirty original outperforms a skinned one. If yours is dim and hazy, leave it alone, let it be described honestly, and let a specialist conservator advise afterwards if anyone wants to.

If one has come to you

Four things to check, in order: the support — panel or canvas; the surface — matte or glossy; the signature and any date; and the back of the frame, for a gallery label. Those four answers will tell you within a wide margin what you are holding.

Then photograph it. Front, back, the signature, the label, and a raking-light shot across the surface if you can manage one. Do not take it out of the frame yourself, and do not touch the paint.

We catalogue American paintings out of Twin Cities estates, and this is a category — like John Fery, for entirely different reasons — where the description does a great deal of the work. "Painting of a nun, signed" and "egg tempera on gesso-prepared Masonite panel, signed lower right, titled verso, Midtown Galleries label" are the same object described two ways, and they attract two entirely different rooms.

If you have a Vickrey, or something you think might be one, send us photographs. A first opinion costs nothing, and we would much rather see it before anybody reaches for a cloth.