Robert Cole Caples Correspondence with Anthony Shafton

Robert Cole Caples (1908-1979) came to Reno, Nevada from New York City in 1924 to live with his father, a doctor who had relocated after divorcing Caples’ mother. Caples was a largely self-trained artist and autodidact intellectual who never graduated high school. His national reputation was never higher than in his early twenties, as portraitist of Reno divorcees. Regionally his reputation rests on the Indian portraits he drew during the Depression under the Federal Arts Project (later reproduced in two portfolios by University of Nevada Press) and on the mountain landscapes of his maturity. Caples was the model for the artist Lawrence Black in The City of Trembling Leaves, a novel by his friend Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Caples left Nevada for Connecticut with his fifth wife Rosemary in 1958. There he eventually stopped painting. In 1971, he self-published his spiritual testament, The Potter and His Children, an illustrated children’s book. Caples, whose health had always been fragile, died at age 70.

Caples exhibited in numerous group and solo shows during his lifetime, the most significant being the 1964 retrospective mounted by the University of Nevada, Reno. The predecessor of Reno’s current Nevada Museum of Art (NMA) held a posthumous retrospective in 1981, and in 2009 the NMA published an online Education Guide to accompany a traveling Caples exhibition, an initiative of the Nevada Arts Council. Caples works are held by the NMA, the Nevada Historical Society, the Nevada State Museum, this university, and in many private collections.

Anthony Shafton (1937- ) is a Chicago native and Reno resident, with degrees from Harvard College and Stanford’s graduate Creative Writing Program. He has published five books, most recently The Nevada They Knew: Robert Caples and Walter Van Tilburg Clark (2017). It was as a result of writing a fan letter about The City of Trembling Leaves to Clark that Shafton, through Clark’s introduction, met Caples in 1964, overnighting at Robert and Rosemary Caples’ Connecticut estate. Shafton never met Caples again, but the two corresponded from 1964 until the artist’s death. The Nevada They Knew is the story of the friendship between the Caples and Clark and a critical study of their works, wrapped inside a memoir of Shafton’s connections with the two men and their influence on his life. Shafton’s earlier books are The Apostate Heriger (1962), a novel; Conditions of Awareness (1976), a monograph on primate psychology and human paleopsychology; Dream Reader (1995), a survey of psychological approaches to dream interpretation; and Dream-Singers (2002), a sociology of African-American dreaming and dream sharing.