John B. Lear Jr.(1910-2008) was born and raised in Chestnut Hill, PA and he attended Chestnut Hill Academy where he showed an early talent for art. He said his inspiration came from two uncles who he said were “Sunday painters.” He studied illustration under Thornton Oakley at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts).
During World War II he served in the Army cavalry in Fort Reilly, Kan., where he painted portraits of officers and their families. He also illustrated Army training manuals, booklets and charts. After the war, he returned to Chestnut Hill where he remained for the rest of his life. His life as an artist revolved around working as a freelance illustrator, teaching and creating paintings and drawings for exhibition. A trip to England in 1931 turned him into a lifelong Anglophile. He returned to England at least 10 times and used his photos and his memory to create many striking landscapes. He called this work his “records,” in which he captured the natural world with his artist’s eye. His other work he described as “creations” – composites of realistic and yet disparate images in dreamlike landscapes. His major emphasis was on composition, and color. “In both paintings and drawings, my work has been described as semi-surrealistic or symbolic in content,” Mr. Lear said. “The technique is closer to rendering rather than of a painterly quality.” Those who own and collected his work came faithfully to each new exhibit, and most of his work was sold by the end of each opening.
In addition to the Woodmere Art Museum, he was associated with the Philadelphia Art Alliance, the Philadelphia Watercolor Club, the Philadelphia Sketch Club, the Art Teachers Association and the American Watercolor Society. Mr. Lear’s oil paintings, watercolors and drawings are in private collections in the United States and abroad and in the permanent collections of the Detroit Museum, the Florida Gulf Coast Art Center in Clearwater, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Reading Museum and the Woodmere Art Museum in Chestnut Hill, with which he had been associated since its opening in 1940. His work was displayed in numerous solo and group exhibitions. In Chestnut Hill, his paintings and drawings were seen often at the Hahn Gallery and at Woodmere.
