"He was really amazed," said Leonore Templeton, his widow. "She kept doubting that he actually came to paint her portrait. She was such an unassuming lady."
Robert Templeton, who died in 1991 at age 62, spent years painting portraits of civil rights leaders, including an 8-foot oil painting of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. His collection is on display at Mattatuck Museum Arts & History Center in Waterbury through March 22 in an exhibit called "Lest We Forget: Images of the Civil Rights Movement."
"They're compelling works because the large scale and the close-up view gives us a real sense of the character and the personality of the leaders of the movement," said curator Cynthia Roznoy. "He had a good insight into personality and was able to express that through his brush."
Templeton's project, first shown at Emory University in Atlanta in 1986, gave him an insider's view of the turbulent times and those who shaped them. His family is hoping to find a permanent home for the collection.
"He hoped with his paintings he would move people who walked though the collection to have a change of heart if they were in any way racist, that they could see these people in all their dignity, all their determination," Leonore Templeton said.
Robert Templeton was born the year of the stock market crash in 1929, and his father eventually lost the family farm in Iowa.
"He really grew up experiencing poverty," Leonore Templeton said. "I think naturally he had sympathy for the underdog from his own experience."
Templeton was doing portraits in Detroit when riots broke out in 1967. He drew sketches that wound up on the cover of Time magazine and are on display at the museum, but it was a dangerous assignment as rioters set fires and gun shots filled the air.
"They were throwing bricks at my husband, too," Lenore Templeton said, recalling that a man reached through Templeton's car window and tried to strangle him.
Templeton had seen segregation up close earlier in Atlanta, where he witnessed sit-ins at lunch counters. Moved by what he saw in the South and in Detroit, he began his portrait project so that civil rights leaders would be remembered.
"He said he was sure someday they would succeed and this injustice would end," Lenore Templeton said.
