Robert Daughters was one of the most accomplished contemporary painters of the Taos and Santa Fe landscape, a Missouri-born advertising executive turned full-time painter whose self-described "composist" practice combined Impressionist color and Expressionist gesture into a distinctive late-twentieth-century vocabulary for the New Mexican high desert.
Robert Daughters (1929–2013) was an American painter best known for his expressionist landscapes of northern New Mexico. Born and raised in St. Joseph, Missouri, he served three years in the military after high school, worked as Curator of Display at the St. Joseph Museum of Natural History, and studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and School of Design. For seventeen years he ran a partnership in a Kansas City advertising-art studio, accumulating awards from the National Society of Art Directors and other industry organizations, before walking away from advertising in the late 1960s to commit himself fully to fine-art painting.
A 1953 visit to Taos had introduced him to the New Mexican high desert that would become his lifelong subject; he moved with his family to Santa Fe in 1970 and to Taos in 1972, where he lived for twenty years in the historic Oscar E. Berninghaus home and studio. He described himself as a "composist", his own term for a painter built on color harmony, the contrast of light and dark value, and underlying compositional structure, and was part of a contemporary group of working Taos painters who took the same name (the "Taos Six") as the original Taos Society founders. He received the 2004 Master's of the Southwest Award from Phoenix Home and Garden magazine, and his paintings have been collected and exhibited throughout the Southwest in the years since his death.