Poor was a painter, ceramicist and architect. His family originally came from Andover, Maine where his grandfather had a mill and was a blacksmith. His father established himself as a grain broker and banker in Kansas City where Poor attended a manual arts high school. He then moved to Palo Alto, California where he completed high school and then entered Stanford Universiy where he began in economics but soon switched to art.
After graduation (1910) he toured Europe and then settled in London where he studied at the Slade School of Art and at the London County School with Walter Sickert. He then went on the Paris where he studied at the Acad‚mie Julian. During this European period Poor concentrated on drawing and was exposed to the work of Manet and the post-impressionists, influences which made an indelible mark on his subsequent work.
Upon his return, he taught at Stanford and then at the San Francisco Art Association under the critic J. Nilsen Laurvik. After serving in World War I, Poor came to New York and settled in the artist's colony at New City, New York (Rockland County) where he built his own home. His first New York exhibition at Kevorkian Galleries (1920) was not financially rewarding, and so he turned to ceramics.
By 1921 his ceramics were selling at the Bel Maison Gallery at Wanamaker's and by 1922 they were on view at Montross Gallery, selling very well. Poor received many ceramic tile commissions and installed fancy tile bathrooms in the homes he built for notables along South Mountain Road in New City. The culmination of this period was the formation by him and others of the short-lived American Designer's Gallery (1928) which marketed and publicized American avant-gard interior design work. The income from this work enabled him to return to painting by 1930.
Exhibitions at Montross (1931) and Rehn (1933) were well received by the critics; his style had matured through the much freer and more abstract work he had done in ceramics. His portraits, genre scenes, nudes, still lives and landscapes reflected the styles of the post-impressionists, Cezanne, Matisse and Gauguin. His work had a certain intimacy to it, as most of his subject matter reflected his personal feelings about home, family, friends and environment.
In the latter part of the decade, mural work became his major focus with commissions for the Department of Justice Building (1936) and Conservation of American Wild Life [fresco, 9 x 40 feetfor the United States Department of the Interior Building (1939). The Land Grand Frescos for the Pennsylvania State University (1940, 1949) (ABG - pls check on dates as to whether two separate dates or "from and to") and murals for the Courier-Times Building in Louisville (1948) also featured American history subjects.
