FitzGerald studied at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, and with Mark Tobey and Eustace P. Ziegler. His primary media of practice is watercolor painting, with marine scenes a favored theme, and it was in that classification he was elected to the Academy. However, he also works in oils, and has done significant work as a muralist. Perhaps his major undertaking in the latter form was his ten by forty foot mural executed in 1947 for the Seamens Church Institute, New York. It depicted a segment of the Omaha Beach landing of the Normandy invasion, including a distant view of the LST FitzGerald commanded while on active service in the United States Navy during World War II--a variation on the traditional background interjection of the artist's self-portrait. (When twenty years later the Institute's building was demolished, FitzGerald refurbished the painting at the request of the National Maritime Union for reinstallation in its Joseph Curran Plaza, New York.) Among other sites of his murals are the American Museum of Natural History, New York; Cranford (New Jersey) Junior College; and post offices at Ontario, Oregon; Colville, Wisconsin; and Preston, Idaho.
Working in watercolor, FitzGerald also saw duty as a Navy combat artist during the Second World War; as a Naval Reserve officer, he did similar service in Viet Nam in 1964. On commission from the Humble Oil Company to paint a series of scenes related to the laying of the Alaskan pipe line, in 1971 he returned to the arctic area where he had worked with the U. S. Geological Survey in the 1930s.
FitzGerald was a president of Allied Artists of America; in 1971 he was made honorary president of the American Watercolor Society; and was a member of National Society of Mural Painters. He was the author of Painting and Drawing in Charcoal and Oil, 1959, and Marine Painting in Watercolor, 1972. He was a member of the Academy school faculty from the 1972-73 season through that of 1978-79. A long-time resident of Larchmont, New York, he moved to Cincinnati in 1979.
