Word: hubard
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Richmond this week, two museums were showing the work of an odd painter named William James Hubard, who died there in 1862. Hubard had painted gloomy but perfectly proper portraits of Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay and Richmond belles for a living; evenings he turned his hand to what he called "Gothick" fantasies. A few, like his Silent Violinist (see cut), were weird enough to recall his melancholy contemporary, Edgar Allan...
...Hubard's past was as shadowy as his art. He assured his Richmond neighbors that he was "an Englishman of good descent." Looking at his tangled hair and piercing eye, people thought he might be a gypsy. He had arrived in Manhattan at 17, with one Mr. Smith who set him up as a silhouettist on Broadway. Admission to the "Hubard Gallery" (50) had entitled visitors to "see the Exhibition and obtain a correct Likeness in Bust cut by Master Hubard who without the least aid from Drawing Machine or any kind of outline but merely by a glance...
...knows just when Hubard stopped scissoring and began painting, or when he parted from Mr. Smith. He did rather well as an itinerant portraitist, and even better after he had married into Virginia society and settled down in Richmond...
...patrons, Richmond Poetaster Mann Valentine (whose minor and forgotten writings he illustrated) tried to put the successful young painter under a microscope. Hubard, Valentine wrote, was "small, delicate looking, black hair, brown eyes, harelip, Roman nose, large mouth; strongly marked features:-when quiet- painful, sad, and thoughtful; when he laughs it is hysterical and rarely with a hearty guffah...
...almost as strange as his beginning. At 46, Hubard became obsessed with the notion that Houdon's marble bust of George Washington ought to be cast in bronze. He built his own foundry, spent seven years and all his savings to make six reproductions of the bust. At the start of the Civil War he tried to recoup his losses by turning his foundry into a Confederate arsenal. He began experimenting with explosives and blew himself...