You may not know of Samuel J. Woolf, a New York painter and portrait sketch artist who was born in 1880 and died in 1948. I didn’t either until I picked up a battered old book with the above title in the basement of the Strand Bookstore about 30 years ago. It looked to be written from a serious artist’s perspective, with lots of “inside” information, so I took it home with me for $2. It turned out to be the finest personal record of an artist’s life I have ever come across. Its 372 pages are liberally sprinkled with anecdotes and observations about Sargent, Inness, Matisse, Twachtman, Kenyon Cox, Emil Carlsen, and many other artists, as well as trenchant comments on the study and practice of painting and drawing. Woolf’s eloquent prose and remarkable eye for detail made it a distinct honor to accompany him on his fascinating journey through life.
After studying for three years at The Art Students League, my
own “alma mater,” he painted portraits, did illustration work and was an artist
in France
during the First World War. After the
war, needing a steady income, he fell into an exciting career as a portrait sketch
artist for Time Magazine, The Herald Tribune and The New York Times in the 1920s
and 30s. His superb charcoal sketches of
world leaders and other famous men and women were accompanied by accounts of
his conversations with them as they sat for their portraits, with only brief
notes on the margins of his sketch paper to jog his photographic memory.
His autobiography, published in 1941, reproduces 32 of these
charcoal sketches, including those of Mark Twain, Henry Ford, George Bernard
Shaw, General Pershing, Winston Churchill, Fiorello LaGuardia, George Gershwin,
Salvador Dali, Walt Disney, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Albert Einstein and
Benito Mussolini.
Woolf’s detailed report of his encounter with Mussolini in
1929 offers a remarkably intimate portrayal of “Il Duce,” who ruled Italy
as the leader of the National Fascist Party from 1922 until his ouster in
1943. Woolf writes that at the beginning
of the portrait sitting, Mussolini “spoke of himself, of his father who was a
blacksmith, of his own exile in Switzerland,
where he worked as a mason, and … how he had returned to Italy
and began writing for a paper. ‘Then the
war came,’ he continued, ‘and I learned so much that I was no longer a
socialist.’”
The sitting was interrupted several times by visitors. During each of these interruptions, Woolf
writes that Mussolini “showed anger and pleasure, disgust, hatred, satisfaction
and impatience” in his speech and body language. “Mussolini must have noticed the suspicion of
a smile on my face as he arose to salute the last visitor, for, before raising
his hand, he gave me a broad wink and then went on as he had before.”
That action, according to Woolf, “confirmed my first
impression of the man – a strain of humor and a love of the theatrical are
mingled with real ability…He recounted his long days of strife and nights of
work. His dark eyes flashed as he spoke
of his efforts to show the people of Italy that they needed a new type of
government, that old parties should die and the country be saved” from the
growing influence of Russian communism.
The encounter ends with Mussolini signing Woolf’s sketch in
pencil, erasing his choice of the word “compliments,” and replacing it with
“felicitations,” at the suggestion of his male secretary, “saying almost
prophetically, ‘we all make mistakes.
Unfortunately not all can be corrected as easily as this one.’” As we know, two years after his ouster Mussolini was captured
and executed by Italian Partisans in 1945, and hung upside down in Milan for
public viewing.
Woolf writes astutely about the people he met and the world
he lived in, as well as the family into which he was born. His non-religious Jewish parents only went
to synagogue once, and that was to attend a funeral. Woolf states that “the little theological
knowledge I had” was acquired from his maternal grandmother. He had asked the author of “The Magnificent Ambersons”
for advice about how to write about members of his family, and Booth Tarkington
told him: “So long as you hesitate, I advise you to sit down and tell all that
you know about them. Wasn’t it Oliver
Wendell Holmes who pointed out that man is an omnibus in which all of his
ancestors reside? To give a true picture
of yourself, you have to describe all the passengers you are carrying.” And so he did.
Perhaps his grandmother’s theological instruction was the
strongest influence on his development because Woolf closes his fascinating
narrative with a spiritual crescendo of thought that is as moving for me as
another of my favorite literary passages, the stream-of-consciousness flurry of
words that ends Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.”
Woolf sets forth a number of paragraphs beginning with “He
has…” as he rapidly summarizes his life experiences, before concluding with an allusion
to a verse from the Old Testament First Book of Samuel, Chapter III, Verse 4, that provided
the title for his memoir:
“As a man of sixty, he pushes aside celanese curtains and
looks out on the world in which there are wars and strikes, famine and floods,
in which there are also sunshine and joy, a world in which men are born, live,
love, work and die. He has lived his
life, trusting in something, he knows not what.
He hears his name, and although he does not know who calls, he answers:
“Here am I.”
As a latecomer to art and its passionate hold over me, I was
enthralled by this book, and wept when I finally set it down.
