Word: painters
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Walking Paintings. It is a wise child that knows its own father. Nicolette Devas, 55, British painter and novelist (Nightwatch, Bonfire), had two of them: her natural father, Francis Macnamara, best described as a genius-at-large, and her adoptive father, Augustus John, painter, patron of English gypsies, and uncrowned king of bohemia...
...John house in Dorset was liberty hall, in which all the liberties were enjoyed by the patriarch painter. Wives, models and mistresses ("Augustus's paintings walked about") shuttled to and fro in various states of concubinage. Pooh-bahs of the literati strutted through the rooms. Nicolette recalls William Butler Yeats as a "Sacred Great Man" revered for his poetry, but also as a ham self-consciously impersonating his own image. T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) lost his mythological status because of the "cringing, obsequious" way he called Augustus John "Master." Besides, after he bragged to the children that...
...artist, because "art" was the only thing she could do, and married an artist-Anthony Devas-because artists were the only people she knew. But she had the good luck or good sense to pick a nonflamboyant type with solid talent who achieved a modest success as a portrait painter, with no impulse to live it up, sleep around or hurl defiance at the bourgeoisie who bought his pictures...
...Seen from close up by Nicolette's appraising eye, he is not as admirable as he appears in his own autobiographical fragment, Chiaroscuro, or as bogus as in Aldous Huxley's satirical portrait of him as "John Bidlake" in Point Counter Point. Nicolette writes well, with a painter's eye for places and faces and a feminine instinct for character. These qualities plus Irish wit lend a novelistic point to her portraits of some great period figures...
...Moon and Six Guineas is a brittle-brutal study of a once fashionable painter, John Howland, a "Bostonian and Mayflower descendant, educated at Dixwell Latin School and Harvard." He made his first mistake in becoming an artist; his second was to leave-together with his corny canvases-a portfolio of pornographic sketches. His daughter and heir destroy this Back Bay smut. The Auchincloss irony? That the smut just might have restored the reputation of Howland's square work in today's crooked intellectual auction room...