Word: boyd
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Book. Portrait painting is distinctly not among the lively arts. Wherefore it is not profitable in the U. S. nowadays. But even scholars and gentlemen prefer to have their books sell. Wherefore Mr. Ernest Boyd, though he has called his new book Portraits, has not been indulging solely in profitless portraiture. He has also, and more often, been cocking a sharpish eye, flicking a sharpish pen and dashing off a row of caricatures as lively as ever you please...
...entire collection is hung under two general placards, Imaginary and Real. In the first row, all of them caricatures, hang sundry types of mankind which it has been Mr. Boyd's fortune to encounter or divine-Aesthete: Model 1924, A Literary Lady, A Literary Enthusiast, A Critic, A Liberal, A Synthetic Gael, The second row is subplacarded Impressions-brief sketches of Cabell, Hergesheimer, G. B. Shaw and others; and Close-Ups -the big pieces of the exhibit, presenting among others George Jean Nathan, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Moore and Mr. Boyd's countrymen -Yeats, Stephens and George...
...that Mr. Boyd is ever actually serious. He is at once too sensitive and too self-assured to become earnest in public. His concern with men is not vicarious. It is the concern of a formalist who takes you among men to show you the shapes of their minds, their ideas, their words and how they use them, their manners and how men are revealed therein. Being vigorous and Irish, he walks close beside you, pointing here, there, with nervous, witty gusto. Being excessively sensitive and shy, he hides himself behind a mask of erudite satire whenever...
...sportive pomposity amuses Mr. Boyd enormously. Most of the time it amuses the reader. His greatest delight and accomplishment is punning in phrases, giving a clever twist to another's epigram, or setting, in the midst of an immaculate sentence, some rich gem of slang. Occasionally his erudition waxes into windy verbosity, but not for long. Soon there will come a forthright shaft of sarcasm, or a quotation, such as Yeats' remark about George Moore: "What a pity Moore never had a love affair with a lady-always with women of his own class...
...Significance. The most notable of the caricatures, Aesthete: Model 1924, first published in the maiden issue of The American Mercury, gave Mr. Boyd the intense satisfaction of stirring to obscene and frenzied anger a whole Greenwich Village nestful of half-baked literati whose baseless pretensions to significance it is Mr. Boyd's spirited but impersonal mission in life to deny. The Yeats, Moore and Stephens portraits, while of small dimensions, are of a purity which few contemporary critics could well equal. Add to these considerations the facts that Mr. Boyd is the thorough master of several languages, both dead...