Richard Estes is an American painter who is best known for his photorealistic paintings. The paintings generally consist of reflective, clean, and inanimate city and geometric landscapes. He is regarded as one of the founders of the international photo-realist movement of the late 1960s.
Most of Estes' paintings from the early 1960s are of city dwellers engaged in everyday activities. Beginning around 1967, Richard began to paint storefronts and buildings with glass windows, and more importantly, the reflected images shown on these windows. The paintings were based on color photographs he would take, which trapped the evanescent nature of the reflections, which would change in part with the lighting and the time of day. While some amount of alteration was done for the sake of aesthetic composition, it was important to Richard that the central and the main reflected objects be recognizable, but also that the evanescent quality of the reflections be retained.
His works have been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.