Book excerpt: Robert Vickrey's unique vision and meticulous, painstaking technique have sustained him throughout a sixty-year career. He is widely considered to be a living master of using egg tempera, the same labor-intensive medium used by Renaissance painters, including Giotto and Cennini. But Vickrey's concerns are distinctly twentieth-century in the subjects and themes he has chosen, from childhood innocence to the dichotomy of urban versus country living. "A quintessential Realist, Vickrey endeavoured to explore the human condition within a distinctively American environment," writes author Philip Eliasoph, whose essay argues that Vickrey's work builds a bridge from Surrealism and New Objectivity to Magic Realism. Described by the New York Times as the "world's most proficient craftsman in tempera painting, [and] an immaculate technician," Vickrey's oeuvre is the "fiercely independent work of one of its most unorthodox and even most daring inventors," according to Eliasoph. AUTHOR: Philip Eliasoph is a professor of art history at Fairfield University. Virginia M.Mecklenburg is Senior Curator of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. SELLING POINTS: A comprehensive survey of the 60 year career of a master of tempera painting, an artist who has been included in nine Whitney Museum of American Art Annual Exhibitions 80 color plates show off the brilliant light-infused compositions of Vickrey's paintings Includes scholarly essays placing Vickrey in the context of the twentieth-century American art 128 colour & 43 b/w illustrations