NEW YORK, NY.- Robert Andrew Parker, a prolific watercolorist whose impressionistic paintings illustrated books, album covers and magazines for nearly 70 years, and who continued to work into his 90s even though his vision was diminished by macular degeneration, died on Dec. 27 at his home in West Cornwall, Connecticut. He was 96.

His daughter-in-law Shantal Riley Parker confirmed the death.

Parker’s watercolors have a loose, fluid style that Print magazine said in 2013 achieved “maximum effects with minimal amounts of detail.”

He painted monkeys and landscapes, imaginary battle scenes and spectators under umbrellas at the Masters golf tournament, circus elephants dancing a ballet and Duke Ellington conducting his orchestra at the Newport Jazz Festival.

His work appeared in books, many of them for children, and in magazines like Fortune, Esquire, Time, The New Yorker and Sports Illustrated. He also sold watercolors for the fine art market.

“Bob came up at a time when many illustrators were influenced by Norman Rockwell’s techniques, so there was a certain photorealism,” Steven Heller, co-chair of the MFA design department at the School of Visual Arts, said in a phone interview. “But he, Robert Weaver and Alan Cober were the first wave of breaking through this realism and sentimentalism with an expressionistic intensity and impressionistic fluidity.”

Early in his career, Parker captured the attention of poet Marianne Moore, who wrote an appreciation of his work in 1958.

“Robert Parker is one of the most accurate and at the same time most unliteral of painters,” she wrote in Arts magazine. “He combines the mystical and the actual, working both in an abstract and realistic way.” In praising a Parker watercolor of a dog, she added, “A cursive ease in the lines suggests a Rembrandt-like relish for the implement in hand; better yet, there is a look of emotion synonymous with susceptibility to happiness.”

Parker and Moore later collaborated on the book “Eight Poems” (1962), for which he painted fish, ostriches and other animals.

Among the dozens of children’s books Parker illustrated were “Flight: A Panorama of Aviation” (1981), by Melvin B. Zisfein, and “Action Jackson” (2002), about artist Jackson Pollock, by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan. Parker’s use of “flicks of almost-Japanese-style flung ink” to mimic Pollock’s drip paintings was lauded in The New York Times by art critic Peter Plagens.

His illustrations for “Ballet of the Elephants” (2006), by Leda Schubert, recall the ballet conceived by the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in 1942 for 50 elephants and 50 ballerinas, with music by Igor Stravinsky and choreography by George Balanchine.

“When Schubert mentions Balanchine and Stravinsky’s youth in Russia, Parker offers a delicious vista of onion-domed churches silhouetted against a darkening sunset,” Jed Perl wrote in his review in the Times.

Parker received the Randolph Caldecott Medal, the highest honor for an illustrated children’s book, for his work on “Pop Corn and Ma Goodness” (1969), a nonsensical tale about a couple’s family life, told in verse by Edna Mitchell Preston.

Parker also produced etchings (most notably a series about Nazis ironically called “German Humor”), sculptures and monotypes. He was elected to the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 2004.

“There was a casualness in his attitude toward his work,” said Joe Ciardiello, an illustrator who was a friend of Parker’s. “So many artists can get so fussy about the correct kind of paper or the proper pen or paints. But Bob would use whatever he had — people would give him paint, he’d use cheap stuff, expensive stuff. He wasn’t precious about it.”

Robert Andrew Parker was born on May 14, 1927, in Norfolk, Virginia. His father, William, was a dentist who, because of his position with the U.S. Public Health Service, moved his family occasionally. His mother, Harriett (Cowdin) Parker, was an amateur artist who kept her son supplied with art materials.

Bob began his artistic work in earnest when, after he contracted tuberculosis when he was 8 or 9, he and his family moved from Michigan to Fort Stanton, New Mexico, for the more arid climate. He spent most of the next two years in a bed on a screened-in-porch, reading voraciously and sketching battle scenes from the Second Italo-Ethiopian War and the Second Sino-Japanese War, based on radio accounts of the conflicts.

After serving in the Army Air Corps as an airplane and engine mechanic, he enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1952. He then moved to New York City, where one of his prints was included in an exhibition of young artists at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He taught art for a few years at the New York School for the Deaf, studied for a summer at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and built his printmaking skills at the Atelier 17 studio.

Then came an unusual opportunity. He was asked by MGM to go to Paris to work on “Lust for Life,” the 1956 biographical film that starred Kirk Douglas as Vincent van Gogh.

The original plan was for Parker’s and Douglas’ hands to alternate on-screen, where they would appear to be creating van Gogh’s paintings. But they worked on only one, “Wheatfield With Crows,” before Parker’s job became copying about 100 of van Gogh’s drawings and paintings to use in the film. With his earnings, he bought enough paint in France to last him 12 years.

Back home, he began to work for major magazines. Fortune sent him to Guatemala to depict United Fruit’s banana industry, and to Algeria, Libya, Bolivia and Argentina to illustrate oil exploration in those countries. He also painted imaginary war scenes for Esquire in 1960. Sports Illustrated dispatched him to the Masters.

The Air Force sent him to document — through painting, sketching and photography — military operations in Colombia and Panama. He also painted covers for albums by jazz artists including Thelonious Monk, Art Tatum and Dave Brubeck.

Parker, who had a longtime interest in jazz, wrote and illustrated the children’s book “Piano Starts Here: The Young Art Tatum” (2008), which Kirkus Reviews praised for its “ink-lined watercolors” that “that revel in as resplendent an interplay of hue and tone as Tatum’s improvisations.” He also played drums in a band called Jive by Five in New England for about 30 years.

He is survived by his sons, Christopher, Anthony, Eric and Nicholas, all of whom play drums professionally, and Geoffrey, an artist, and by six grandchildren. His first marriage, to Dorothy Daniels, ended in divorce. His second wife, Judith Mellecker, who was the Talk of the Town editor at The New Yorker and collaborated with him on two children’s books, died in August.

Parker began noticing changes in his vision in 2000 and was diagnosed that year with macular degeneration. He adjusted by working with his face closer to his paintings, as his vision was eventually diminished by 60% to 70%. As his reading slowed, it would take him a full day to read The New York Review of Books.

In interviews in 2014 and 2015 with the Vision and Art Project, which explores the impact of macular degeneration on artists, he described his vision as “hazy and wavy” and said that his drawing had become less precise.

“I look at old sketchbooks,” he said, “and thought I could still do that line. Sometimes I have to say no. But I don’t know if that’s age or eyes or both.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.