Robert Vickrey, a painter whose often unnerving depictions of shadow-streaked streets populated by nuns, clowns or children at play made him a leading figure of the magic realism school, died on Sunday at his home in Naples, Fla. He was 84.

The death was confirmed by his son, Scott.

Mr. Vickrey, who mastered the Renaissance technique of egg tempera painting as a student at Yale, used his consummate skill to create, in his early work, hyper-real scenes suffused by an atmosphere of dread or impending disaster. He was an avant-garde filmmaker on the side, with a deep knowledge of expressionism and film noir, whose shadows, angles and distortions he introduced into his paintings.

In the 1950s and ’60s Mr. Vickrey was a highly visible artist. He was included in no fewer than nine of the Whitney Museum’s annual exhibitions showcasing contemporary art. He was also commissioned to paint dozens of portraits for the cover of Time, notably a portrait from life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for the magazine’s Man of the Year issue in 1964.

As his style of painting fell out of favor, Mr. Vickrey was relegated to the margins of the art world. Critics did not always respond kindly to the more upbeat tone of his later painting, moreover, which seemed closer to Andrew Wyeth and Norman Rockwell than his chilling early work.

In the 1980s, a reassessment of magic realism, and of overlooked artists like Paul Cadmus, Jared French and George Tooker (who died on March 27), led to renewed interest in Mr. Vickery’s work. He was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Art, Science and Industry in Bridgeport, Conn., in 1982, and of a biography by Philip Eliasoph, “Robert Vickrey: The Magic of Realism” (Hudson Hills, 2008).