Word: hopkinson
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Really There. There were a few fine portraits. Lester Bentley's George Wyckoff Jr., a straightforward picture of a boy whittling, looked like a good bet to win the exhibition's popularity prize. Charles Hopkinson's carefully constructed Double Portrait of a mother and daughter showed the dean of U.S. portraitists at the top of his form. At 80, Hopkinson is more than ever concerned with creating an illusion M>f reality on canvas. "Things are really there," he explains, with a diffident wave of his hand, "so why shouldn't one try to capture...
...please himself, Hopkinson does watercolors between portrait commissions. Last week Boston's Margaret Brown Gallery was exhibiting the landscapes he painted on a trip to New Zealand last year. The work of a lifelong sailor, his watercolors are sometimes as taut with motion as a sailboat in a stiff breeze...
...landscapes," Hopkinson explained I'm concerned with the flow of line in a mountain or a tree-the gesture of the thing." To capture it he works even faster than most watercolorists, using fluid and staccato strokes of vibrant color, but unlike more abstract moderns he never lets "the gesture of the thing" obscure the thing itself. "Being a sentimentalist, I want to get across the pleasure of what I see in nature...
...also gets across his pleasure in people, and when it comes to portraits he can afford to pick & choose. Hopkinson's sitters have included a score of college presidents, a brace of bishops, and such thinkers and men of letters as Alfred North Whitehead and John Masefield. Hopkinson hit an early peak in 1921 with his portrait of Charles W. Eliot, in which the late, great Harvard president's ramrod back is tellingly contrasted with the folded gentleness of his big hands. A more recent painting of Harvard's James Bryant Conant seems to show him searching...
...soft-spoken as his art is assertive, Hopkinson thinks his approach to portraiture "very oldfashioned. But just as on the stage it is easier to act a drunken man than a line character, it is easier to draw a caricature than to paint a face that denotes fine character. I've always tried to find the fine things rather than to make a sneering comment...