Word: portrait
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...remarked. "He'd like everybody to have a title." Queen Elizabeth had had a private showing two days earlier (her wartime sittings for John were interrupted by a German bomb; she is reported to think that she has taken on a bit too much weight to have the portrait continued...
...most ambitious paintings in the new show was The Little Concert, a huge (9 by 12 ft.) monochrome which he had delivered still wet to the galleries. The London Times thought that it was "full of recklessly mingled details." In the portraits, every detail counted. The elaborate flowered background lent a heavy air of luxury to his portrait of Massachusetts' onetime Governor Alvan T. Fuller. John had hesitated at first to accept that commission because of Fuller's part in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. ("Would his share in the tragedy invalidate him as a subject for my brush...
John had gone ahead with the job, on the principle that "the portrait painter should allow no moral bias to affect his attitude to the sitter. The exploration of character should be left, with confidence, to the eye alone. Heaven knows what it may discover!" In Fuller, John's glaring eye discovered a well-fed man of conscience-dignified, amiable, and perhaps not particularly intelligent...
...detractors charge that John is as much of a "personality" as an artist. His champions retort that John's preoccupation with personality, his own as well as others', is perfectly natural and proper in a portrait painter. His own exuberant, self-assertive nature looms large in his work; and some of his portraits are raised above the potboiler class only by the force of his style. John's dashing brush flourishes are as distinctive as another man's handwriting. Wyndham Lewis once described him as a man of action "into whose hand the fairies stuck...
...York's Democratic Congressman Arthur G. Klein suggested that the Treasury print a three dollar bill, bearing a portrait of the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt...