National Portrait Gallery | Face to Face blog

Phelps Fever: Portrait of Michael Phelps at NPG

Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive. . . .It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Michael Phelps! Olympic superhero Michael Phelps accomplished what he came to Beijing to do: he became the first athlete to win eight gold medals in a single Olympiad.

His dominance was unprecedented, and even otherworldly—perhaps he was born on the planet Krypton? Well, Baltimore, actually, in 1985. Five of Phelps’s wins were in individual events, and he broke seven world records overall. Counting the six gold and two bronze he won at Athens in 2004, Phelps has now collected a total of sixteen Olympic medals.

To help celebrate this historic athletic achievement, a large chromogenic print of Phelps, taken by photographer Ryan McGinley, has been installed on the first floor of the National Portrait Gallery’s north wing. McGinley photographed the members of the 2004 United States Olympic swim team for a special edition of the New York Times Magazine; this photograph of Phelps was featured prominently. It will be on view at NPG through January 2009. 

Physically, the 6’4” Phelps is unique: he has an incredibly long arm span of 6’7” that boosts propulsion, an elongated torso that eliminates drag, and size-fourteen feet-flippers that allow him to undulate through the water like a wave.

For the moment, Phelps says that “every day it seems like I’m in sort of a dream world,” but his longer goal is to continue “to raise the bar a bit more in the world of swimming.”

Michael Phelps/Ryan McGinley, 2004/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Lyndon Baines Johnson, born August 27, 1908

August 27, 2008, marks the one-hundredth birthday of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the thirty-sixth president of the United States. Johnson took the oath of office aboard Air Force One after the November 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, and served as chief executive during one of the more trying times of the republic.  This presidential portrait of Johnson was painted by artist Peter Hurd in 1967; it is on view at the National Portrait Gallery, in the "America's Presidents" exhibition. 

Known for his up-close and abrasive tactics of persuasion and administration, Lyndon Johnson’s management style was not dissimilar to his lifestyle. At his ranch in Texas, LBJ enjoyed strong-arming guests into going deer hunting; among those guests were John F. Kennedy and Washington Post publisher Philip Graham, neither of whom enjoyed his outdoor excursion with the big Texan.

Late in his administration, the nation seemed to be coming apart in front of him, and Johnson decided to forego running for a second term, telling America his decision in his famous “I shall not seek, and I will not accept” speech of March 31, 1967. Johnson died at his home near Stonewall, Texas, on January 22, 1973.   

"Johnson’s legacy will continue to be a matter of historical debate. But whatever future biographers may say about him, I am confident that his impact on the country beginning in the 1930’s and lasting until the end of the 1960’s, when he left the national scene, will be remembered as considerable."

Robert Dallek, Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President

"May 18 [1961]—Kitty and I arrived in Bangkok about 4 P.M. in moist and incredible heat. . . . At six, I had a meeting with the State Department officials accompanying the Vice-President. The situation is full of despair. The Department people are at their wits’ end with Johnson. Johnson’s people are similarly furious with the Department. Johnson, in the Department’s view, won’t adhere to schedule; he identifies diplomacy with a campaign tour; and he is oblivious to the necessities and niceties expected of any visitor from abroad. In the opposite view, he has been loaded with an excessive schedule by people who are more concerned with protocol than performance, are not very efficient and do not appreciate a forthright approach to people. Evidently, I have some work cut out for me."

John Kenneth Galbraith, Ambassador’s Journal: A Personal Account of the Kennedy Years

"When we arrived in Cleveland [during the presidential campaign of autumn 1964], I went up to LBJ’s room. The president was lying on one of the beds in his suite, and Jack Valenti was there as well. They were talking about how Lady Bird’s train-trip campaign swing through the Southern states was going. Something displeased the president while I was in the room, and I became an awkward witness to a scene I wouldn’t soon forget. He suddenly turned on Jack and laid him out savagely , the unpleasantness exacerbated by being delivered in front of a relative stranger. It was quite callous and inhuman, something I have never witnessed before or since. I had heard about LBJ’s temper but had never seen it in action; Jack, however, was used to these tantrums and remained unflustered while I squirmed. I escaped as quickly as possible."

Katharine Graham, Personal History

"In his address to the joint session of Congress on March 15, 1965, President Johnson made one of the most eloquent, unequivocal, and passionate pleas for human rights ever made by a President of the United States. He revealed an amazing understanding of the depth and dimension of the problem of racial justice. His tone and delivery were sincere. He rightly praised the courage of the Negro for awakening the conscience of the nation. He declared that the national government must by law insure every Negro his full rights as a citizen."

Martin Luther King Jr., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson

"Because of Vietnam, we cannot do all that we should, or all that we would like to do. We will ruthlessly attack waste and inefficiency. We will make sure that every dollar is spent with the thrift and with the commonsense which recognizes how hard the taxpayer worked to earn it. We will continue to meet the needs of our people by continuing to develop the Great Society. . . . Tonight the cup of peril is full in Vietnam."

Lyndon B. Johnson, State of the Union Address, January 12, 1966

"The liberal distrust of LBJ’s domestic policies was not fatal. The Waterloo came over Vietnam. LBJ got the full blame for this war, although what he did was to carry out and implement the policies of his predecessor. And he got no credit for the liberal domestic programs."

Walter Trohan, Political Animals

Lyndon Baines Johnson/Peter Hurd, 1967/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the artist/Frame conserved with funds from the Smithsonian Women's Committee

Elvis and Isaac: The Memphis Music Legacy

On August 16, 1977 the eyes of the world turned to Memphis, Tennessee, as the news broke that Elvis Presley was dead at the age of forty-two. This portrait of Elvis is on view in National Portrait Gallery's "Bravo!" exhibition, and was painted by artist Ralph Wolfe Cowan, during the years 1976 to 1988.  In a 2006 letter to NPG, Mr. Cowan told of the portrait:

It wasn’t until the early 1960s when I was asked to open the first portrait-painting studio at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.  It was then that Elvis walked in—put his hands across the door and said, “You can’t get away from me this time. . .and I’ll wear whatever you want!” I started drawing him that night on a blank 48 inch, circular canvas that was adandoned when you told me he preferred the full-length size.  When the full-length painting was finished, Elvis came by and personally carried the four-foot by seven-foot painting across Las Vegas Blvd to his room at the Aladdin Hotel where he always stayed. . . .

After Elvis died…I was able to restore and repair the circular Elvis portrait.  As you can see, I added the red shirt and blue sky to make it different from the Graceland painting. . . .I’ve heard from clients who have seen the portrait hanging in the National Portrait Gallery that it gets great attention.  For that I am very happy. 

Last week, as legions of Elvis fans gathered in Memphis for the thirty-first annual candlelight vigil outside of Graceland, the world had already been reminded of the power of Memphis music with the passing of Isaac Hayes on August 10.  A multiple Grammy winner, Hayes also won an Oscar for the soundtrack of the 1971 blacksploitation film Shaft.  Most recently, he endeared himself to a new generation, voicing the role of “Chef” on the animated series South Park.   

The impact of Memphis music on the world scene cannot be overestimated; Memphis, Tennessee is to music as nineteenth-century Paris is to art.  In 2000, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History installed a permanent music exhibition in Memphis in the Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum; NMAH curator Charlie McGovern noted that “it’s the first time the Smithsonian has created an entire exhibition and turned it over to the community where it began.”  The exhibition, “Rock ‘n’ Soul: Social Crossroads,” is a narrative of Memphis music history and is located at the historic corner of Beale Street and Highway 61.  A later study by the Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum declared that city name Memphis is mentioned in more song lyrics than any other city on earth.    

There is no such thing as a single, stylized Memphis sound; Memphis music stretches across all the disciplines of modern music and occupies space in rock and roll, country and western, rhythm and blues, rap, hip-hop, and pop.  Among the names Memphis claims are the Box Tops, the Gentrys, Charlie Rich, Otis Redding, the BarKays, Steve Cropper, Donald “Duck” Dunn, Booker T and the MG’s, the early Sun Studio artists, Aretha Franklin, and WC Handy.  Both Led Zeppelin and REM have recorded at Memphis’ Ardent studio, which also serves as home base for ZZ Top. 

Listen here and learn more about the Memphis sound, from NPG Researcher Warren Perry (8:30)

For more on the Rock 'n' Soul museum, be sure to see their website.

 

Elvis Aron Presley/Ralph Wolfe Cowan,1976-1988/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of R.W. Cowan   

Portraits Alive! Tours by Teen Ambassadors Bring NPG’s Collection to Life

Come to the National Portrait Gallery and see the 2008 Portraits Alive! Teen Ambassadors breathe life into portraits of Martha Graham, Coretta Scott King, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Rita Hayworth, Jean Grae (above), and other notable American figures.

These students from Washington–area high schools signed up to work with NPG educators to learn about museum careers and museum theater. In this ten-week-long program, each student chose a work from the Portrait Gallery’s collection, performed historical research on the sitter, wrote a script, and perfected a solo performance featuring that sitter. To see the students’ impressive work, take the Portraits Alive! museum tour. Remaining dates are Tuesday, August 19, through Thursday, August 21, at 2:15 p.m., and Friday, August 22, at 1:00 p.m. Meet in the museum’s F Street Lobby.

In this blog post, we focus on Martha Graham, as interpreted by Lauren Walker, a rising sophomore at Duke Ellington School of the Arts. She performs alongside a 1938 portrait of Martha Graham on view in the NPG exhibition “Bravo!” Below is the script that Walker wrote for her performance:

As Martha Graham (passages in quotations are from Graham’s autobiography Blood Memory):

“I am a dancer.” Unlike most dancers, I don’t live in order to dance; I dance in order to live. Dance is life and without life there is death. My name is Martha Graham, and as you know, I am a dancer. Although simpler in its meaning but yet complex in its expression, I am a mover. Ever since I was a child, I have always been fascinated with movement and the way humans use their bodies to express how they feel. This fascination of movement and the human body I got from my father; he was a physician who worked with the human nervous system. The one thing he used to tell me that directly related to his profession was that “movement never lies.”

I was born and spent half of my life in a town in Pennsylvania called Allegheny. The portion of my life that I spent there was completely bland and colorless. It was so overly religious in its attitudes that dancing was seen as a sin. So in 1909, when my family and I moved to Santa Barbara, California, it felt as if I had escaped from the harsh regulations of Allegheny. In Santa Barbara, there were no rules against dancing or free expression. In Santa Barbara I felt free for the first time in my life.

I had a fascination with dancing and the body because “the instrument through which dance speaks is also the instrument through which life is lived.” The body is a vessel and it should be treated with care and respect. I had such a tremendous fascination, that it was no surprise I started a dance company in 1926. This was very important for me because I could now achieve much more than I ever could by working for someone.

I received inspiration for my choreography from everything, but I received most of it from my ancestral roots and sharp, angular movements.

Ethel Merman: Queen of the American Musical Stage

In this blog post, Amy Henderson, a historian at the National Portrait Gallery, discusses Ethel Merman, and her 1971 portrait by artist Rosemarie Sloat.  The portrait is currently on view at NPG, in the "Bravo!" exhibition, on the museum’s third floor mezzanine.

It was one of the most riveting moments of my life—the day I strolled into my office and found myself face-to-face with Ethel Merman. The Queen of the American Musical Stage was not there to visit me, needless to say, but to pay homage to the larger-than-life portrait that hung on my wall. The portrait was enormous, more than seven feet high, and depicted La Merman outfitted in fringe and toting a gun for one of her best-known roles, as Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun. Dressed this day in a subdued suit and with her hair swirled into a light brown cloud, Merman stood enraptured by the painting.

There were tears in her eyes when she turned to me as I tiptoed into the room, trying not to interrupt—well, actually, I was trying not to jump up and down and scream “Wow!! You’re Ethel Merman!!!” Her voice was soft as she said, “I love this picture.” But it was definitely The Voice.

It was the same voice that had catapulted her to overnight stardom in the Gershwins’ 1930 Broadway musical, Girl Crazy. When she sang “I Got Rhythm” on opening night, she stopped the show: “I held a high C note for sixteen bars while the orchestra played the melodic line—a big, tooty thing—against the note. By the time I’d held that note for four bars the audience was applauding. . . .” They kept applauding, and she did several encores. “When I finished that song,” she recalled, “a star had been born. Me.”

Her vibrant personality and clarion voice reverberated through Broadway’s greatest years, and America’s leading composers adored her. Cole Porter once said, “I’d rather write songs for Ethel Merman than anyone else in the world,” and songwriters from the Gershwins to Stephen Sondheim and Jule Styne agreed. Merman thought it was because she was always true to the lyrics—“I sing honest. Loud, but honest.”

Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun was a defining role for her, providing the anthem that became her signature song, “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” Opening at the Imperial Theatre on May 16, 1946, Annie Get Your Gun ran for 1,147 performances. Twenty years after Annie’s premiere, Merman starred in a highly successful revival at Lincoln Center. She became so closely identified with the role that when her portrait was painted for a 1971 Gallery exhibition, “Portraits of the American Stage,” she chose to be depicted as Annie Oakley.

Artist Rosemarie Sloat was selected to paint her, and she began by sketching Merman in her dressing room at the St. James Theatre after a matinee performance of Hello, Dolly! Sloat reported that she was extremely cooperative—“She’s a warm, wonderful woman and she talks constantly.”

For the portrait, Sloat used her palette knife to layer stars, spangles, and fringe with hills and valleys of paint. And to create the filigreed curtains and embroidery effect for the Annie costume, she squeezed swirls and gobs of acrylic directly from tube onto canvas. The three-dimensional metallic texture showcases the brassy Merman stage personality—so much so that Merman suggested the portrait be used as the cover illustration for the Annie Get Your Gun cast recording.

Indeed, Ethel Merman was so fond of this portrait that when she heard that a search was on for a donor, she bought it herself and presented it to the National Portrait Gallery. It is the only life portrait of Ethel Merman ever done.

Ethel Merman/Rosemarie Sloat, 1971/Oil and acrylic on canvas/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Ethel Merman

Herein Hangs a Tale: The Bache Silhouette Book

In the 1920s, Alice Van Leer Carrick, the pioneering authority on American silhouettes, came upon an album kept by William Bache (1771–1845) as a record of his work and expressed her delight in “turning the pages of this century-old treasure-trove of nearly two thousand shadow portraits.”

There she found images of Chancellor George Wythe, President Thomas Jefferson, and Secretary of State Edmund Randolph, as well as “hundreds of other profiles of everyday people, less well-known, but equally well cut; all of them vivid and interesting.” This duplicate book of 1,846 images, which had long remained in the hands of Bache descendants, came to the attention of the National Portrait Gallery’s Curator of Prints and Drawings Wendy Wick Reaves and was acquired in 2001.

Research on Bache—first heard from with his patented physiognotrace (a profiletracing apparatus) at Baltimore in 1803 and who subsequently traveled to Virginia, New Orleans, Cuba, and New England—is ongoing. Research on the scores of men, women, and children who seized the opportunity to have their shadows cut is also under way, and many of them have stories evocative of the era in which they lived.

Bache identifies number 361 in the album as “Col Butler"(shown on right): Thomas Butler, a Revolutionary War soldier and Indian fighter, and an officer in the U.S. Army. He was—when he gave up a few minutes of his time and one dollar to secure “four correct likenesses” of himself from Bache—in trouble because he refused to cut his hair and give up his queue.

On April 30, 1801, the commanding general of the army, James Wilkinson (Bache number 216), had issued an order requiring all military men to crop their hair, and Butler was among the many conservative officers who chose to ignore a decree that not only infringed on personal preference but also carried with it an association with the radicals of the French Revolution.

Butler, a law student before he became a professional soldier, pronounced the order “impertinent, arbitrary and illegal.” He was court-martialed in 1803, found guilty, and reprimanded. When he was subsequently transferred to New Orleans, General Wilkinson hoped that, in the interest of preventing “trouble, perplexity and further injury to the service,” Butler would “leave his tail behind him.”

Butler arrived in New Orleans on October 4, 1804, his pigtail intact. He was arrested and in February formally charged with “willful, obstinate and continual disobedience.” An indignant Butler continued to insist that he considered the order to crop his hair “an arbitrary infraction of my natural rights.”

A military tribunal was convened on July 1, 1805, and from St. Louis, Wilkinson instructed the commanding general at New Orleans to make those who would sit in judgment of Butler aware “that the President of the United States, without any public expression, has thought proper to adopt our fashion of the hair cropping.” (Bache shows Jefferson in 1804 with a dangling queue.)

On September 7, while awaiting the final outcome of his trial, Butler died at his nephew’s plantation a few miles above New Orleans. He told his friends he wanted his queue displayed at his funeral. “Bore a hole through the bottom of my coffin right under my head,” he directed, “and let my queue hang
through it,—that the d---d old rascal [Wilkinson] may see that, even when dead, I refuse to obey his orders.” There was no evidence that this was done, but thanks to William Bache, Butler’s pigtail has remained in full view down through the ages.

Various Sitters/Ledger book of William Bache, with associated pieces, c. 1803-1812/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; partial gift of Sarah Bache Bloise

Book Review: Literary Circles of Washington by Edith Nalle Schafer

In the National Portrait Gallery Bookstore, a find for the sight-seeing literati…

Sure, Washington is a political town, but the District of Columbia has also hosted many amazing American writers and some bizarre moments in America’s literary history. 

Ezra Pound, for example, one of the creative forces who shaped twentieth century American poetry, was sympathetic to the fascist powers ruling Italy in the 1930’s and during World War II.  While self-exiled in Italy, Pound spoke out against America during the war and was captured by the American military during the occupation of Italy.  He was eventually returned to the United States, put on trial for treason and found to be insane.  Ezra Pound was kept in the asylum at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital here in the nation’s capital from 1946 to 1958.  Schafer records, “The persistence of [Pound’s] literary friends… eventually won his release and he returned to Italy.  From the deck of the Cristoforo Colombo in Naples harbor, Pound gave the fascist salute and told Italian reporters, ‘All America is an insane asylum.’”

Edith Schafer’s Literary Circles of Washington is an economically written (seventy-five page) account of Washington DC’s role in the history of American literature.  Schafer includes, when possible, the street addresses of the writers and the locations of many noteworthy episodes, including Ezra Pound’s period of institutionalization.  Schafer’s work is a fine tourist’s guide to these local markers, such as Katherine Anne Porter’s home in Georgetown, of which she writes, “Here’s a tidbit to ponder at 3106 P Street.  There, Elinor Wylie rang the doorbell of her friend Katherine Anne Porter, saying she intended to kill herself and Porter was the only one she wanted to say goodbye to.  Porter responded, ‘Well, goodbye, Elinor,’ and closed the door.’”

Schafer tells us that the Willard Hotel has seen such guests as Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emily Dickinson, while local cemeteries serve as the final resting places for Dashiell Hammett (Arlington), F. Scott Fitzgerald (St. Mary’s in Rockville), and Henry Adams (Rock Creek).  Complete with maps and drawings, Literary Circles of Washington is a useful field guide and a nifty volume of anecdotes.  

Samuel Dashiell Hammett's gravestone, Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia

F. Scott Fitzgerald's gravestone, St. Mary's Cemetery, Rockville, Maryland

The gravestone of Henry Adams, Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, DC

Portrait of Frank O’ Hara by Larry Rivers

            © Larry Rivers/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Early in the morning of July 24, 1966, a summertime party at a beach house on Fire Island, Long Island, began to break up. As the revelers started to drift home, the poet and art curator Frank O’Hara (1926–1966) walked out onto the beach and was hit by a speeding dune buggy. He died the next day.

Frank O’Hara’s greatest memorial is his Collected Poems, but he also quickly received an artistic homage from his friend and collaborator, artist Larry Rivers. From 1957 to 1960, Rivers and O’Hara had worked together on a project called Stones, a lithographic marriage of the visual and the verbal.

For his memorial portrait of O’Hara, Larry Rivers created this work, called O’Hara Reading, which is part of the National Portrait Gallery’s collections. The piece used a characteristic technique of collage and multimedia, verbal and visual, in way that evoked his dead friend’s own poetic technique. Rivers took his central image of the poet from Fred McDarrah’s photograph of a 1959 reading; the black-and- white picture is colored and includes images of Leroi Jones, Allen Ginsberg, and Ray Bremser, who were also at the event.

O’Hara had had some minor successes as a poet during his lifetime, but he was best known in New York City’s cultural world as an instigator: bridging the worlds of art, poetry, and society; sparking ideas; initiating projects; and stoking creative energies through his charismatic personality. A friend and collaborator of artists of the New York School, O’Hara was dubbed “the poet among painters,” but he was generally seen as only a minor figure in a circle that extended from Jackson Pollock to Larry Rivers.

Yet when O’Hara’s literary executors Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery cleaned out his apartment, they were astonished to find file after file overflowing with poems. Ashbery introduced The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara in 1971 by saying that it would surprise everyone—“and would have surprised Frank even more”—to discover a volume of nearly five hundred pages.

Ashbery accounted for this in O’Hara’s method: “Dashing the poems off at odd moments—in his office at the Museum of Modern Art, in the street at lunchtime or even in a room full of people—he would then put them away in drawers and cartons and half forget them.”

O’Hara was not an occasional poet or an amateur: he was deeply committed to his art, but he believed poetry was an instantaneous act, one that occurred between “two people, not two pages.” What O’Hara’s poetry needed to spark him into life was the city: the cacophony of daily life in all its ordinary glory. O’Hara made it a point to write a poem every lunch hour, based on his purposefully aimless walks around New York, and he had published a book called Lunch Poems in 1964.

Superficially, his poems were about nothing much in particular, and with characteristic modesty he called them his “I do this, I do that” poems. But O’Hara’s quirky eye for the telling detail turned these ephemeral jottings into art; his seductively deceptive lines would build to a moment of recognition or an emotional punch.

In his portrait of O’ Hara, Larry Rivers created a curving stream of words caught between two blue embankments made of construction paper. In the midst of life and art’s river, the print quotes the opening lines of “To a Poet,” a work that O’Hara wrote, with characteristic generosity, to praise an emerging writer named John Wieners.

O’Hara limns the young poet’s ecstatic discovery of his art and then his perfection of it:

Two years later he has possessed
     his beautiful style,
the meaning of which draws him further down
     into passion. . .

“Drawn down into passion”: It is almost as if O’Hara was writing about himself.

Frank O’ Hara / Larry Rivers, 1967 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution /© Larry Rivers/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

The Reinstallation of Grant and His Generals

As visitors walk through the intertwining hallways of the National Portrait Gallery, they often come upon Grant and His Generals by Ole Peter Hansen Balling—the largest work in our collection. This portrait measures 10 x 16 feet and weighs 450 pounds! So exactly how did it get to its current location in the stairwell?

While the building underwent more than six years of renovation, Grant and His Generals was safely housed in an offsite storage facility. When it was time for the painting to be returned to the building, much of the space was still under construction. To move the painting in, a large crane was used to hoist it from Seventh Street onto the second-floor portico, and then into the building. A platform extending beyond the portico served as the landing point. Here, an NPG employee used a rope to help guide the painting onto the platform.

Grant and His Generals was meticulously reinstalled in its current location on the curved wall of the second-floor stairwell. First, a large scaffolding unit was built in the stairwell. Next, a tapeline was made on the wall so that the exact placement could be achieved.

Once all preparations were made, the painting was uncrated, hoisted by numerous people, and moved into place. The original aluminum strips that secured the painting to the wall were reattached, and the original custom-made curved frame was reinstalled. Grant and His Generals was then covered in plastic to protect it from dust until the National Portrait Gallery reopened on July 1, 2006, after being closed for renovation.

A large crane hoists Grant and His Generals from Seventh Street onto the second-floor portico.

Grant and His Generals by Ole Peter Hansen Balling, oil on canvas, 1865, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, gift of Mrs. Harry Newton Blue in memory of her husband, Harry Newton Blue