Richard H. Bassett was born February 21, 1900, on the campus of Trinity College, now known as Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina.
[1] In 1906, the family moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, after John Spencer Bassett published a controversial article supporting equal rights of African Americans and was forced by pressure from politicians to resign his position.
[1] In the Spring of 1911, Bassett moved with his mother, Jessie Lewellin Bassett, to Vevey, Switzerland where he was enrolled in private school and began studies with the Swiss painter, Henri Edouard Bercher, a graduate of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Geneva and a frequent exhibitor of landscapes at the Suisse Salon des Beaux-Arts.
Tudor-Hart would often suspend school for a month or so to travel, and Bassett took these opportunities to return to Paris and to study at the Academie Colarossi and especially the Grande Chaumiere.
During this period Bassett decorated rooms and facades of elaborate houses in New York, Florida, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.
During this period Bassett studied drawing with George Bridgman at the Art Students League of New York.
In 1937, after his marriage to Henrietta Durant of Charleston, South Carolina, Bassett and his new wife moved to Boston, where he had five one-man shows in and around Newbury Street in the next few years, three of them in the prestigious Grace Horne Gallery.
In 1969 Bassett served as editor and an author of a full-length text for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, along with other distinguished collaborators, on the teaching of art in school systems.
A prolific painter, Bassett produced a large body of work that until 2011 was closely held by his estate.