Born in North Carolina, the artist and poet Jesse Murry (1948–1993) studied art and philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College before moving to New York City in 1979. Fusing the Romantic painting tradition of John Constable and J. M. W. Turner with the quality of mind and imagination of Wallace Stevens’s poetry, Murry uniquely sought to create a “landscape” within the fiction of painting that could be “more than a place to dwell but a suitable space for dreams.”