As a child, he spent his summers at Bee Tree Farm, the family retreat built by his grandfather, industrialist Towner K. Webster.
[2] As a youth, he traveled with his family to Paris, France where he was enthralled by the paintings of the French impressionists and post-impressionists and embarked on his own fledgling efforts at plein-air cityscapes.
A reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune endorsed that opinion, comparing Webster's technical skills to those of Sargent, while others praised his expertise at capturing the momentary impression of a place and his exceptionally convincing and precise use of light as the force defining its mood, climate, and urban disposition.
The outbreak of World War II had soon shifted him to the assembly line at Grumman Aircraft Corporation, leading to his pursuit of an engineering degree at Columbia University and seven years of steady employment designing airplanes.
A fire ravaged this building four years later, however, destroying more than sixty of his canvases and cheating Webster of his successful re-entry into the city's art world.
Webster's creative inclinations eventually lured him back into active painting, and the decades of the 1960s and 1970s saw him creating both landscapes and figural studies and exhibiting that work internationally in an array of salons and galleries.
[4] His commitment to painting lyrical seascapes and city scenes in an impressionist manner continued unabated, and museum exhibitions featuring recent work by the artist were still being organized into the mid-1990s.