Word: willson
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...Miss Willson is at least 150 years old. If she ever died, nobody knows when or where. If she ever had a first name, nobody knows what it was. About all that remains of Miss Willson is 20 primitive paintings that Manhattan gallery-goers snatched last week (at prices from $25 to $300) from the walls of the Harry Stone Gallery...
Faddists of the primitive were fascinated. For Miss Willson's paintings (of subjects like General Washington on Horse, The Prodigal Son Receiving His Patrimony, Riotous Living, Henry and His Pet Goat, Lovers) revealed a forthright, uninhibited graphic touch as clear and gay as sunlight. Typical was General Washington, decorative, naive, fantastic. General and horse were suspended in air, unpropped by Delaware ice cakes or the neoclassic columns of Mount Vernon. The plume on the General's tricorne hat looked like a Christmas tree. Though utterly alone, the Father of His Country drew rein and fired his pistol...
Even more fanciful was Miss Willson's orange, pink, green and yellow Pelican (she probably never saw one), tattooed with conspicuous crosshatchings, line-and-dot motifs, gaudy flowers...
Pageants were enormously popular. In Philadelphia Charles Willson Peale whipped up a magnificent triumphal Peace Arch in 1783, groaning with symbols. It was to be illuminated by skyrockets and 1,000 candles, but it caught fire. Undaunted, Peale invented "an ingenious mechanism" for dropping a laurel wreath on the brow of George Washington, who had to put up with that sort of thing wherever he went. The launching of the Constitution was staged "with marine background scenery bordering on the marvelous, with a final climactic picture of Niagara Falls." In Americana and Elutheria Benjamin Franklin stepped out of lightning-forked...
Admiral King also got a Chief of Staff (for the fleet). Rear Admiral Russell Willson, to take more work off his hands. Navymen knew that "Rey" King did not give a Bosun's curse for old Navy tradition. If any ranker in the Navy could make them pop, things would now pop. And COMINCH King (who changed the abbreviation from CINCUS) finally had the popper all to himself...