From Seven to Seventy: Memories of a Painter and a Yankee

by Edward Simmons

This same gentleman had, in addition to his other interests, once owned a string of grocery stores. Guy Wetmore Carryl told me this. It appears that he sold a story to the magazine, and this thrifty editor (later finding no use for it) wrote to Guy and asked him if he would take it back and return the cash he had received. Guy refused. Then the editor wrote and asked him to try to sell it to some one else and “cash up.” This was too much. Stopping at one of the editor’s grocery stores one afternoon, he bought a can of tomatoes which he took home and opened, chose a tomato, bit into it and put it back into the can again. Then wrapping it up, he left it on the editor’s desk with this note.

Dear J——:—I bought this can at your store and do not like it. Won’t you be good enough to try and sell it for me and send me the money?

Needless to say, they did not speak after that.

The American idea is frequently to honor a foreigner because he is a foreigner and not because his work merits the praise. Change a good old Yankee cognomen into something that sounds like Italian or Russian, and the singer is assured a far better hearing. The same in painting. If a third-rate Italian should be in competition with Sargent for a public decoration or a portrait of a President, the Italian would probably get it. About the year 1894 Charles McKim, the architect, was getting ready to beautify Washington and have it cleaned of all its horrors. He died before he accomplished his purpose, but he made a beginning, and that was to decorate the interior of the Library of Congress.

There was a great question in mind as to whether I should join the group of men who were doing the work. The United States always paid less than anyone else, and I was tempted to take more profitable work. I could have accepted any number of orders and hired assistants to carry them out, but I have always felt this was unfair to myself as well as to the public. A decoration is a creative thing and, as such, can be carried out only by the mind that conceives it.

In the Library of Congress I was given one of the rooms to the left of the doorway on the first floor of the building. It is called a curtain corridor. There were nine semicircular panels, nine feet in width at the bottom; therefore the radius was four and a half feet. All such tympanums are stilted, making this radius in reality about four feet ten inches. The argument was, how to get the human figure into a space so low. I did not want to make them half size or even under life, and my decision proved very wise. Elihu Vedder made his figures undersize and the result was that the rest of us dwarfed him. My choice of subject was the Nine Muses, and I resolved to make them sitting down. Terpsichore, the Muse of Dancing, sitting? I contrived to bend her over so that she just squeezed in. There is an old work of the early Greeks in bas-relief of Terpsichore that is one of the most beautiful compositions I know of. She is bending down and arranging her sandal. If I had not been fundamentally opposed to that class of theft, I would have used the idea; but a copy of anything, no matter how great, is never so good as one’s own conception. It is always unwise for an artist to have the classics about him at any time, and he should never have any of them near by to influence him when he is doing compositional work.

There were thirty-six pendentives in the domes of the ceiling, which I decorated with little figures, using no models, but painting directly upon the walls, composing as I went along. I shall never forget this experience. It was in the summertime, and a hot spell struck Washington. Anyone who knows the capital will realize what this means. I was under contract to finish it at a certain time, and here I was working in these little sealed domes (which never were and never could be ventilated), while the thermometer was so high that eighty people died one day from sunstroke. It was mephitic. I was so terrified that I almost lived on milk and limewater.

Right here I would like to say something about health. It is important, perhaps even more for an artist than for any other class of person, to keep himself in trim. Burning up tons of nervous energy, living perhaps a precarious existence, it is necessary that he take himself in hand early in life and learn about his own body. We are not all constituted the same and what is one man’s weakness is another man’s strength. In my own case, I was practically an invalid up to thirty, when I made up my mind to overcome my ailments. Artistic effort needs a tremendous amount of vitality back of it to carry it out, and the sensitiveness which accompanies the creative temperament is easily a prey to small discomforts. Learn your limitations and you can correct them beforehand. Knowing my stomach was my weak link, I treated it with care during the heat at Washington and came out with no disaster.

Several amusing occurrences of that summer come to mind, showing how many contacts an artist has with different walks of life. I was approached by the delegate of a trades-union—a man with dirty fingernails and collar, black sweeping mustache, fat, sweaty, and insolent—who asked me if I were a member of the union.

“What union?” I inquired.