National Portrait Gallery | Face to Face blog

Death of Winslow Homer, September 29, 1910

Winslow Homer's legacy was extensive, and his subject matter covered the spectrum from soldiers to seascapes. Although he was as deliberate as the tides and waves he would depict regularly in his later years, Homer entered the American canon almost as serenely as he entered the vocation of art. Art historian Elizabeth Johns writes:

Two years of apprenticeship were enough. On his twenty-first birthday, February 24, 1857, Homer declared his independence. He had learned what he needed to know. He later compared  the two years [apprenticed to a Boston lithographer] to servitude and refused ever again to work exclusively for one employer; even the popularity of "Harper's Weekly," which was eager for his services, failed to lure him.

In paintings such as Snap the Whip, the viewer sees children at play, an uncommon subject in American art before Homer; however, such light and joyful themes show up in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century, in the works of those apparently influenced by him—American artists such as Edward Henry Potthast and Norman Rockwell. Many of Homer's works contained people, sometimes in leisurely pursuits, other times in more dramatic pursuits. Some of his greatest paintings were simply raw images of man against the mighty sea, and the mighty sea flexing its muscles.

Living his later years in Prout's Neck, Maine, Homer built a studio where he would spend his last decades at work imbuing the seas with rich purples and starkly portraying the beaches and rocks with deep grays and browns. Except for tourists, he was as cut off from the world, choosing his company and choosing his solace. One hundred years ago today, American painter Winslow Homer died quietly in his studio.

-Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

Source:
Elizabeth Johns, Winslow Homer: The Nature of Observation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

Winslow Homer /  Thomas A. Gray / Albumen silver print, , 1863  / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

50th Anniversary of the John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon Debates, part 2

So, with America watching, did Vice President Richard Nixon destroy his chances of becoming president because of makeup and wardrobe malfunctions? Nixon was a skilled debater, but John F. Kennedy was not without speaking skills of his own.

Of Kennedy's performance during the first debate on September 26, 1960, Theodore Sorenson states, “His rapid-style delivery crowded more facts and arguments into each severely limited time period than Nixon could answer.” Robert Dallek observes that the first debate made a definite impression on the American audience, though possibly a false one:

Although polls and larger, more enthusiastic crowds encouraged the belief that Kennedy had won the first debate, [Kennedy] knew it would be folly to take a lead for granted. And by contrast with TV viewers, the radio audience thought that Nixon had defeated Kennedy, demonstrating how important the contrasting visual images were before the camera.

Nixon himself was quick to discover the effect of appearance on viewership. In his memoir RN he records:

It is a devastating commentary on the nature of television as a political medium that what hurt me the most in the first debate was not the substance of the encounter between Kennedy and me, but the disadvantageous contrast in our appearances. After the program ended, callers, including my mother, wanted to know if anything was wrong, because I did not look well.

The margin of defeat in the 1960 election was thin. However, the man who would eventually become the thirty-seventh president of the United States did not concede that the 1960 debates, of which the final three carried lesser audiences than the first, were the pivotal moment. “To ascribe defeat or victory to a single factor in such a close contest is at best guesswork and oversimplification,” Nixon wrote.

An interesting aside to the four debates was the inadequacy of the actual debate panelists, who were members of the press. Sorensen states:

In all four joint appearances, the press panelists—with some notable exceptions—were the least effective performers. Their unimaginative questions were increasingly but ineptly aimed at tripping a candidate or creating a headline instead of eliciting specific issues and information. They rarely had continuity in a single debate but became repetitious in the course of all four. Nor did two-and-a-half-minute answers permit any real debating.

Oddly, the tactic that Sorensen says the press encouraged—forcing the candidate to speak in printable, evocative sound-bites (as we have come to call them)—is a strategy preferred by the modern candidates (i.e., Lloyd Bentsen’s “Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy” or Ronald Reagan’s “Ask yourself, 'Are you better off now than you were four years ago?’”). Sometimes, however, what worked in the sound bite turned around to bite the candidate or officeholder at a later date.

- Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

 

Sources:
Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy (New York: Little Brown, 2003).

Richard M. Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grossett and Dunlap, 1978).

Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).

Images:
Richard Milhous Nixon, 1913-1994 / Bernard Safran (1924-1995) / Oil on masonite, 1960 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 1917-1963 / Shirley Seltzer Cooper (1919-1999) / Pastel on paper, 1961 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Ted Cooper

 

50th Anniversary of the John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon Debates, part 1

Many pundits and critics commented that Vice President Richard Nixon looked terrible during the first televised presidential debates, especially because he was sharing the stage with his youthful and handsome opponent, John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy advisor and biographer Theodore Sorenson writes of the first debate, held on September 26, 1960, “Between the bleak gray walls and the bright floodlights of the television studio, [vice President Nixon’s] gray suit and heavily powdered jowls looked flabby and pallid beside Kennedy’s dark suit and healthy tan.”

The Nixon camp had attempted to impress upon America that Kennedy was too young and inexperienced to be the chief executive: Nixon, though only a few years older than Kennedy, had served as vice president for eight years under Dwight Eisenhower. Interestingly, when Nixon took the oath of office for the vice presidency in 1953 at age forty, he was the second-youngest man ever to hold the office—the youngest was John C. Breckinridge, who served under James Buchanan. However, neither youth nor experience seemed to matter on the night of that first debate. Another Kennedy biographer, Robert Dallek, writes:

Not yet fully recovered from a recent hospitalization to care for an infected knee injured in an accident, and exhausted by intense campaigning, Nixon appeared scrawny and listless. Ironically, Kennedy, whose medical problems greatly exceeded anything Nixon had, appeared to be the picture of robust good health. Kennedy further seized the advantage during the debate when he looked bored or amused as Nixon spoke, as if he were thinking, “How silly.”

At the end of the debate, as they stood on stage exchanging pleasantries, Nixon, watching photographers out of the corner of his eye, “put a stern expression on his face and started jabbing his finger into my chest, so he would look as if he were laying down the law to me about foreign policy or Communism,” Kennedy said. Again, the image was not one of command but of a schoolyard bully.

Before 1960, candidates could bombard voters with radio, television in its early years, newspapers, newsreels, periodicals, and live events. However, the 1960 election would be conducted in the light of a new American affluence. Millions of households owned radios, certainly, but millions also owned televisions, and those audiences were going to witness the Nixon-Kennedy verbal sparring with their own eyes from their own living rooms. This first of four debates was televised from Chicago and was broadcast nationwide on all television and radio stations.

On Friday, September 24, the second part of this article will discuss whether Nixon’s poor appearance on September 26, 1960—fifty years ago this week—actually cost him the election, as has been observed from time to time.

--Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

Sources:
Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy (New York: Little Brown, 2003).

Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).

Images:
Richard Milhaus Nixon, 1913-1994 / Boris Chiliapin (1904-1979) / Tempera on board, 1959 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 1917-1963 / Robert Vickrey, (born 1926) / Egg tempera on board, c. 1959 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Wendy Carolyn Vickrey

September 17, 2010: Happy Birthday to William Carlos Williams, America’s Poet-Physician

William Carlos Williams was born on this day in 1883. Both a pediatrician and a poet, Williams drew from his medical experiences and his observations of daily life in northern New Jersey to write in a distinctly American style. He published his first collection of poems in 1909 and, less than a year later, opened his private practice as a general physician in Rutherford, New Jersey. Fusing the seemingly contradictory identities of poet and scientist, Williams remained dedicated to fiction as well as medicine throughout his life and achieved success in both fields.

As one of America’s greatest poets, Williams strived to capture the American voice in his work, writing about everyday life in the country with colloquial language and a focus on American attitudes. The writer found great inspiration in his fellow New Jerseyans. For decades on end, he listened carefully to his neighbors’ conversations and used their mannerisms to develop the diction and meter that define his work. Linda Wagner-Martin writes, “By concentrating on the dailiness of the poet's experience, using idiomatic language and the rhythms of speech in his poetry, Williams forced readers to see that their lives were poetic.” Many of these characteristics are evident in his poem “Spring and All,” published in 1923 and available at:  http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15536

Williams was one of the Imagist poets, who wrote from about 1909 to 1917. A circle that also included Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and Hilda Doolittle, the Imagists avoided the romanticism of nineteenth-century poetry. They aimed for precision in their work, writing poems that feature clear and concrete images. Williams’s writing greatly influenced the Beat Generation poets, particularly Allen Ginsberg.

 

Works Cited

“Imagism,” Answers Corporation, 2010, accessed September 10, 2010, http://www.answers.com/topic/imagism.

NPG curatorial files, William Carlos Williams.

Linda Wagner-Martin, “Modern American Poetry: Williams’ Life and Career,” Department of English, University of Illinois, February 2000, accessed September 10, 2010, http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15536.

William Carlos Williams, “Spring and All.” The Academy of American Poets, 1997–2010, accessed September 10, 2010, http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/williams/bio.htm.

Images: 

William Carlos Williams, 1883-1963 / Hugo Gellert, 1892-1965 / Crayon, ink and pencil on paper, c. 1930 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

William Carlos Williams , 1883-1963 / Man Ray, 1890-1976 / Gelatin silver print, 1924 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution / Copyright,  Man Ray Trust

 

--Nadia Mahmassani, Intern, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

 

Birthday of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Hero of Little Round Top

More than one hundred and thirty years before Tom Hanks ever portrayed Captain John Miller in Saving Private Ryan, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (1828–1914) served as the prototype of the schoolteacher turned soldier/hero. The proverbial unlikely hero, Chamberlain graduated from Bowdoin College in 1852 and was well into his career as a professor of modern languages at Bowdoin when the Civil War began. Chamberlain felt compelled to join the Union cause and entered the war as an officer.

 

Chamberlain’s wisdom might have been evident in the classroom, but his courage was battle-tested many times, the most brilliant performance of which might have been at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863. Civil War historian Shelby Foote describes the situation at Little Round Top:

 

The fighting was particularly desperate on the far left, where the 20th Maine, made up of lumberjacks and fishermen under Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, a former minister and Bowdoin professor, opposed the 15th Alabama . . . composed for the most part of farmers. Equally far from home—Presque Isle and Talladega were each 650 crowflight miles from Little Round Top, which lay practically on the line connecting them—the men of these two outfits fought as if the outcome of the battle, and with it the war, depended on their valor: as indeed perhaps it did, since whoever had possession of this craggy height on the Union left would dominate the whole fishhook position.

 

Little Round Top held a view of the entire line of Northern defense. So when Chamberlain ordered his men—tired and mostly depleted of ammunition—to fix bayonets late in the day, it is not too much to say that his order saved the Union a terrible loss. A Southern victory at Gettysburg would have quite possibly resulted in a speedy march by Robert E. Lee’s army to Washington, D.C. Tactically, Colonel Chamberlain was not left many choices in the military playbook; choosing a bayonet assault against an equally tired foe, however, won the field and the day for him.

 

Chamberlain would later serve as governor of Maine, and later still as president of Bowdoin College, which numbers among its alumni many famous Americans, including Franklin Pierce, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

 

Would Tom Hanks be as good a choice to play Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain as he was to portray Captain John Miller? Is Hanks the man to reprise the role of a schoolteacher in combat? Although Hanks has shined in the many great projects he has touched, Hollywood seems to be convinced another actor has earned his way into the role of Chamberlain. Jeff Daniels has twice portrayed Chamberlain on film, first in Gettysburg (1993) and more recently in Gods and Generals (2003).

 

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was born in Brewer, Maine on this date, September 8, in 1828.

 

 

 

Additional reading: 

 

Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, Fredericksburg to Meridian, vol. 2 (New York: Random House, 1963)

 

Interview by Kimberly Largent with actor Jeff Daniels at:

http://ehistory.osu.edu/world/articles/ArticleView.cfm?AID=47

http://www.nps.gov/archive/gett/getttour/sidebar/chambln.htm

 

Image:

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, 1828-1914 / Unidentified artist / Albumen silver print, c.1866 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

 

--Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

 

 

 

 

 

Happy 150th Birthday, Grandma Moses!

Anna Mary Robertson was born on a farm on this date—September 7—in 1860. She lived the life of a farmer's wife until the death of her husband, Thomas Moses, in 1927. Widowhood pushed Anna Mary Moses into retirement from farming, and in the mid-1930s she began to paint rural vignettes. Word about her homespun pictures began to disseminate as she entered her octogenarian years. By the time Moses died at the age of 101, she was an international celebrity artist known as “Grandma Moses.”

 

Her art was simple and uplifting. Farm life and the joyful spirit of family enterprise serve the visual core of her work.  While the academic term for her work is called “naïve”—Moses was untrained as an artist and her work was being shown in a small town drugstore when it was spotted by a New York collector—the initial response to her work went well beyond the academy.

 

Late in her life, the artist was invited to the White House, and in 1969, she was posthumously honored on an American postage stamp. Grandma Moses died in 1961; her paintings are now monuments on the American cultural landscape.

 

 

Image:  Anna Mary Robertson Moses, 1860-1961 / Clara Sipprell / Gelatin Silver print, c.1950 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Katie Louchheim

 

--Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

 

In the Spirit of the U.S. Open, Happy 50th Birthday Jimmy Connors!

Tennis has been around for centuries.

In the late medieval text The Turke and Sir Gawain, the Turke shows Gawain a castle wherein the tennis balls are so large they can only be hit by giants:

 

Many aventures thou shalt see there,

Such as thou never saw yare

In all the world about.

Thou shalt see a tenisse ball

That never knight in Arthurs hall

Is able to give it a lout.

 

Shakespeare mentions tennis no less than five times if one includes brief notes alluding to tennis balls and tennis courts. Polonius, describing a scenario of his son Laertes’ possible activities in Paris, briefly mentions tennis to the spy Reynaldo in act 2, scene 1 of Hamlet:

 

He closes with you thus: “I know the gentleman,

 I saw him yesterday”—or t’ other day,

 Or then, or then—“with such and such…

 There was a gaming, there o’ertook in ‘s rouse,

 There falling out at tennis.”

 

Shakespeare, or whoever wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare, must have had some intimate knowledge of the game, because the writer also mentions tennis in Henry VIII/All Is True, Much Ado About Nothing, Pericles, and Henry the IV, Part Two.

After Shakespeare, a few innovations moved the game along until it began to look roughly like what we see today. And then came Jimmy—he was a southpaw, he was a hard-hitter, and he was the kind of man who spoke what he felt with the umpires and the officials. Jimmy Connors, with some help from Elie Nastase, Bjorn Borg, and Chris Evert, moved tennis into the age of rock and roll.

Before the 1970s, tennis was a game, many thought, that was restricted to the country clubs; after the arrival of Jimmy Connors and his Wilson T2000 racquet, tennis became the sport of the seventies.  Sure, there was football and the Dallas Cowboys and the Pittsburgh Steelers, and sure, there was the 1975 World Series between the Reds and the Red Sox; there was even some guy named Ali storming around in the world of boxing, mowing men down to the mat and reciting poetry as they fell.

However, the face of tennis was Jimmy Connors. Title after title, continent after continent, Connors faced the best. In the decade that defined modern tennis, Connors stayed on top of the game longer than anyone. He was the U.S. Open champion three times in the 1970s (twice more in the early 1980s), and he won both doubles and singles championships at Wimbledon during the same decade.

Among his many other accolades, Jimmy Connors was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1998. He is married to another icon of the 1970s, model Patti McGuire. Jimmy Connors celebrates his fifty-eighth birthday today, September 2, 2010.

 

Works cited:

The Turke and Sir Gawain, ed. Thomas Hahn, originally published in Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995) http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/turkfrm.htm (accessed September 1, 2010).

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

Image: Jimmy Connors (born 1952) / by Ross Barron Storey (born 1940) / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine

--Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution