Alton Tobey, who died Tuesday at age 90, was an artist whose work included hundreds of historical illustrations for Golden Books, portraits of luminaries such as Albert Einstein and Robert Merrill, and large-scale murals that hang in courthouses and museums such as the Smithsonian and the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum.

Among his most widely viewed work was a series of paintings executed for Life magazine and the Smithsonian that depicted historical dramas such as Etruscan battles, brain trephination in the Andes, and a comparative mural of tattooed and pierced people around the world titled “Cultural Mutilations in Pursuit of Beauty.”

Tobey’s historical paintings and murals were done in an almost stereotypical idealism, but he also worked in a variety of other styles, including “curvilinear,” a decorative, semiabstract form he invented.

Tobey grew up at New York, where his father was a tailor whose work included making parade uniforms for the National Guard. Tobey claimed that he knew from an early age that he was destined to be an artist. He won his first art school contest at age 9 and eventually got a full scholarship to Yale University. His studies were interrupted by World War II, during which Tobey turned his art to practical purposes by producing blueprints of fighter aircraft.

Tobey taught art for several years at Yale and eventually married one of his students, Rosalyn Caplovitz, a musician and piano teacher. The couple moved to Larchmont, N.Y., where they erected a modernist home of Tobey’s own design. Their neighbors, in vintage Tudor and colonial-style houses, protested at first but soon relented.

During the early 1950s, Tobey began working on Golden Books histories, a series of primers familiar to anyone who grew up in the era, featuring patriotic panoply of the Pilgrims, Founding Fathers, Civil War battles, and the like. Life magazine began running his historical paintings soon after under the rubric “Epic of Man.” In 1957, Tobey painted two Life covers, including one featuring a scimitar-wielding Cossack about to whack off the head of a cringing serf.

During the 1960s, Tobey began traveling extensively in Latin America, at first to research “Epic of Man” images and later for pleasure. Latin styles and color schemes began to appear in his paintings, and he produced pictures of conquistadors and Indian dancers, as well as portraits of Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo.

Two of his portraits, “The Apollo Astronauts” and “Brothers United” – of John and Robert Kennedy – were reproduced on posters and sold millions of copies.

Tobey painted hundreds of portraits of the famous, including Pope John Paul II, General MacArthur, and President Eisenhower. Tobey was inspired by Einstein’s observation that there is no such thing as a straight line in nature to produce paintings in his “curvilinear style,” perhaps his most original contribution to art.

In the 1980s,Tobey began producing “Fragments,” a series of photorealistic body parts – hands, lips, half a face – magnified by several times. Although his paintings of the famous tended to valorize their subjects in best civic-lesson style, Tobey was also capable of trenchant criticism, as in a weird multiple portrait of Ronald Reagan in which the former president disappears, Cheshire Cat-style, except for his grin.

Alton Tobey

Born November 5, 1910, at Middletown, Conn.; died January 4 at the Sarah Neuman nursing home in Mamaroneck, N.Y., after suffering a stroke; survived by his children, David and Judy, and two grandchildren.