An Influential University of Houston Professor Finds a New Life in Round Top

For painter William Anzalone, Round Top has been both home and subject since he and his late wife, Louise, moved there more than 30 years ago. She was one of the state’s first organic gardeners, a community leader, preservationist (she helped establish Henkel Square), and a widely read columnist for newspapers in Brenham and Fayette County. Bill’s stage was — and continues to be — the art world.

For more than half a century, he has been represented by blue-chip Houston gallery Meredith Long & Company, where his nearly annual exhibitions are met with both acclaim and brisk sales. The now-retired art professor — who was an influential teacher at University of Houston for five decades — initially studied architecture at MIT, from which he graduated in 1958. The next year, he and Louise relocated to Houston for his teaching job.

Originally a figurative painter, his 1983 move to Round Top interjected country into the palette and subject of this Brooklyn-reared artist. While occasionally town scenes and farm buildings appear in his oils or pastels, Anzalone is most enamored of the pure land and its changing state based upon season or time of day — rolling hills with newly harvested bales of hay, a stand of trees in the spring, the look of a field at dusk or dawn.

“William Anzalone: Recent Works” through October 22, at Meredith Long & Company, Houston, 713.523.6671.