Word: sitters
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...seven had vowed to live on shipwreck rations until Oregon made its $104 million war-bond quota. But Oregon stuck fast at 62%, with $40 million to go. The raft-sitters got no pity. Small boys on the river bank tauntingly waved hot dogs and ice-cream cones at them. Older folks heckled: "Why aren't you fellows at work?" Said one morose raft-sitter: "We'll stay here till Hell freezes over if it helps sell bonds. But if not, we want to know. We're sure ready...
...young manhood he appeared briefly on the stage, remembers playing a part in a Maxwell Bodenheim-Ben Hecht playlet called Master Poisoners. When his theatrical career flopped, he launched himself as an independent artist by cleverly copycatting famed portraits in which he substituted the face of his current sitter. Decker's first work of this kind was an "old master" portrait of divinely crosseyed Comedian Ben Turpin. Then he painted Charlie Chaplin in the style of twelve old & new masters including Frans Hals, Picasso, Howard Chandler Christy. Chaplin bought all twelve...
Thereafter Decker had plenty of sitters, collected plenty of fat fees. He also instituted a point system, rationing only one portrait to each subject. But the sitter was permitted to choose the famous painting he wished to be dubbed into. Harpo Marx was painted as Gainsborough's Blue Boy, Charlie McCarthy as Hals's Laughing Cavalier, W. C. Fields as Queen Victoria. Prices for these efforts sometimes ran up to $1,000. Says Decker (who suffers from ulcers and diabetes): "An artist doesn't earn a living until after he's dead. People buy his stuff...
Faced with many such free-style virtuosities, observers might not blame the average vain sitter portraitists.* But the few bravura, turn-of-the-century, super-official portraits such as John Singer Sargent's Mrs. Fiske Warren and Her Daughter, and Giovanni Boldini's Miss Edith Blair, smartly included in the show, looked rather like candy-box covers among the rest of the displays...
...common law, a portraitist can be denied his fee if the sitter has warned him that the work must be acceptable to himself...