American, b. February 22, 1933, Brooklyn, New York

Joseph Raffael is an American contemporary realist painter. His paintings, primarily watercolors, are almost all presented on a very large-scale.

Raffael was the youngest of three children and the only son of Sicilian and Swiss-Irish parents, Joseph Marino Raffael and Cora Kaelin Raffael. He became interested in drawing at age 7, and spent his high school years taking classes at the nearby Brooklyn Museum.

From 1951-54, he attended Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City, along with fellow students R.B. Kitaj and Paul Thek. Upon graduation from Cooper Union, Raffael received a fellowship to the Yale Summer School of Art and Music in Norfolk, Connecticut.

Through the support of his instructor Bernard Chaet, Raffael was awarded a scholarship to the Yale School of Art, where he studied color and drawing with Josef Albers and received his BFA in 1956. Instead of pursuing a master's degree, he moved to New York to become a painter, where he worked freelance part-time at Jack Prince Textile Studio, alongside Carolyn Brady, Audrey Flack, and others, while working nights and weekends on his paintings.

In 1958, he won a Fulbright fellowship to study for two years in Florence and Rome, and began painting complexly colored watercolors of flower forms. He mounted his first New York exhibition of his Umbrian watercolors in 1963, at the d’Arcy Galleries, while at the same time battling hepatitis from which he almost died; when he recovered, he shifted to real life images based on photographs.