Word: portraits
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Victoria appeared, at the dawn of the debunking '20s, many critics deplored its un-Victorian tone and sardonic bias. Now, time has so mellowed Strachey's lèse-majesté that his biography has been accepted both as a classic study of Victorianism and a human portrait of the great Queen...
...dean of U.S. portraitists is Boston's Charles Hopkinson. But for all his fame and his 79 years, Hopkinson has never painted a portrait that holds a mirror up to nature. Even if that were possible, he argues, it would not be enough-"a good portrait exists in a separate world, it is not a mirror, and the artist who paints merely to hit off a likeness or, what's worse to please his sitter, is lost...
...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...
...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...
...Portrait of Humility. Unexpectedly, however, this shrewd and seasoned work is very nearly a first-rate novel. It becomes so, not by virtue of Maugham's mastery of form, great as it is, or his humor, of which too much has been made, nor his skepticism, which sometimes grows wearisome. It is distinguished for its portrait of Bishop Blasco de Valero. The devout prelate, self-sacrificing, presiding with terrible humility and conscientiousness over the trials of heretics, is a masterly portrait, equal to Maugham's best, and belonging well up in the gallery of modern fiction...