PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY: ORIGINAL MATERIAL RESTRICTED

HENRY MARTYN HOYT

THE PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST

BETWEEN the eleventh and the twenty-fourth of January, you will be likely to meet in the Folsom Galleries on Fifty-Seventh Street, a conspicuously handsome young man in the early thirties. A young man with a very white skin, very black hair and moustache, an orange necktie, and a general air of having just adventurously landed from Spain or Italy. This will be Henry Martyn Hoyt, who—so the papers said—committed suicide last summer.

But it can't be true. I saw him the other morning across Eighth Street, hurrying along towards his framer's in his yellow-brown tweed overcoat. He made a fine gesture with his stick—he does everything with a gesture—to indicate that if I would follow he would show me some of the pictures before they were sent uptown. And sure enough, there he was in the dimly lit cellar at the back of the shop, staring at a row of canvases with that half-smiling, half-frowning intentness of look that makes his eyebrows so black and thick and his brown eyes so shiny and comprehending.

One by one he turned the canvases to the light. There was the girl with the bandbox, with her pale purity of line and color—Whistler-Tarbell influence, if you like. The girl in the Paisley shawl, glazed richly as a Titian in the Washington Square days. The two little coppery Italian boys in the Ipswich barn—all the old favorites which in one way or another perhaps suggested the various classical influences and admirations of the artist's period of apprenticeship. But here also were half a dozen unfamiliar pictures done since that break of two years which painting had suffered during the war. Henry displayed them with a rather sulky air, muttering something self-depreciatory in the crosspatch tone all his friends know so well. The tone which means (in any artist) that the child in him who has never grown up, wants to be spoiled and reassured.

PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST

No need for contradiction in words. The personal and emotional color of the recent work, the vividness, the freedom, the tendency to simplification, made me catch my breath. A head of a young man in a pair of tortoise-shell spectacles; a French inn-yard, full of sunlight and blue shadow; a Provincetown house, done with a Van Gogh realism and modernity; and—most poignant and poetic of all—an unfinished portrait of a beautiful young girl. They meant, quite simply, to my view, that Henry Hoyt had come into his own.

"It was not for nothing, then," I said, "that you stood in line with the other doughboys waiting for your 'chow'—do you remember how I happened on you in Tours, behind the Y. M. C. A. hut"?

"And do you remember the little lost café where I dragged you for dinner to listen to my Ancient Mariner's lament of the A. E. F."?

Could I ever forget that little café with its mediaeval stair and its dingy upper room, where Mme. la Patronne, oozing benevolence from her tight calico person, scolding him like a son of the house, set Henry's omelette and his *vin ordinaire* on the checked oilcloth with her own hands? I still see him leaning across the table, his black brows meeting in a conspiratorial line—though there was no one to hear but two old French carters in blue blouses, who, even if they had understood English, wouldn't have taken in the language of this fiery protestant. A touch of extravagance, a wealth of subtle reference, a recasting of average things in highly personal and intense terms; that was Henry Hoyt's talk. Perhaps his most individual and most complete medium of expression. The substance of it, on this occasion, was that he had breakfasted on quinine pills in the toe—or was it the heel?—of Italy, till the glory of aviation ended definitively in chills and fever; had then hauled mail sacks for a weary period in a Paris post office; and finally—when offered his release, with due apology—re-enlisted as a private in the Photographic Section, because—well, God knew why. War was a tragic failure as a solution for anything whatever. But he had to see it through. Even though it confirmed him every day more surely in his "wild bolshevist theories."

## ARTIST

personal and the freedom, the breath. A spectacles; a face; a Province- d modernity; a washed portrait simply, to my

you stood in front of 'chow'-doys, behind the mediaeval stair- trone, oozing landing him like vin ordinaire still see him going in a conspir- ative but two old men if they had the language of Italy, still seen in a consoli- dation, because he was a person and he was most expressionist. The breakfasted off Italy, till all the day and fever; in a Paris post office due apology from his most recent client, because he was a solution through. Even though in his "wild

mediaeval stair- trone, oozing landing him like vin ordinaire still see him going in a conspi- ative but two old men if they had the language of Italy, still seen in a consoli- dation, because he was a person and he was most expressionist. The breakfasted off Italy, till all the day and fever; in a Paris post office due apology from his most recent client, because he was a solution through. Even though in his "wild

## PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST

At this point, one of the old Frenchmen whom the artist had been sketching as he talked, came up confidently to ask for his "portrait."

"That's my only real contribution to the Entente," said Henry, ruefully. "Look at my drawing book—like a check book, full of stubs"!

Perhaps the reason Henry Hoyt feared success—and he did fear it, unduly—was that he had attained early a very exceptional mastery of technique, both in the handling of paint and in the use of line. Such facility in any medium—and Hoyt had at least three at his command—often tempts men to cheap and easy success. This artist was born recalcitrant to anything that was not utterly sincere and hardly-won in art. He had, fortunately or not, just enough means to scorn money as an end. So he worked, after he left the schools, to please himself.

His way of working was not, however, self-centered, one-idead. He was a craftsman as well as an artist, a poet as well as a draughtsman, an etcher, a portrait painter. One might find him in the midst of old Spanish furniture with a great deal of red and gold about it, browsing in strongly flavored books like Rabelais, Browning and the Elizabethan dramatists. He would be carpentering, or digging in the garden with the children, as often as painting. One saw him—yes, even happily "changing the baby." Temperamentally restless, highly intelligent, impatient of certain of the stupidities of everyday life and people, he was instinctive, utterly simple, outgoing, unselfish, over-generous even in his deeper affections and sympathies. I have never known anyone more honest, more ready to lay all his cards on the table. Henry was incapable of hoarding an emotion in order to paint a picture with it. He spent it at once as it came from his heart, and it sometimes seemed that his children and his wife absorbed the inner core of his vital force during those pre-war years.

The war, I believe, did a very great deal to change Henry Hoyt's orientation. In the first place, it rather definitely uprooted him from the conventions and traditions of the world in which he was born; against which he had always half-rebelled, yet whose constraining spell he had not before really cast off, either in life or in art. He was projected like a

PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST

catapult into that humble, plodding, suffering universe whose
rough savor had always excited his longing. His dreamer's
revolts were transformed into realities. He became the
"underdog," not only in imagination, but in fact. And this
set him free, or began to set him free.

Like other young Americans with curious minds and fine
sensibilities, he found the process of freedom, of emerging
from the war, a very painful thing. He began to seek some
philosophy of regeneration for the social order. And this
seeking, this uprooting, caught him into black whirlpools of
unhappiness.

"Then Earth smote
Thy life out with excess of joy and pain,"

says one of his poems. "Excess of joy and pain" were just
what his friends felt and adored in Henry Hoyt, even in the
good old days. A certain superlative quality, colored like
the orange tie, which expressed itself in overstatement, in
passionate happiness or passionate despair. The balance for
the moment was on the side of despair. Hope died within
him. And they found him one night dead in his Tenth
Street studio.

The friends who loved him will never forgive themselves
that they were not somehow able to make him realize in time
the strength of their faith in him as a man and as a painter.
Just because he had gone through such deep and bitter waters
his contribution to American art should have been of lasting
significance. His work, as it stands, is sensitive and robust.
It has poetic fire and rare honesty of vision. Yet for all its
variety and brilliance, it is less complete than the artist himself.
Look especially at the black-and-whites, which are perhaps his
most joyously expressive achievement, and the etchings, with
their truth and high integrity. But don't admire any picture
too much. For in that case the invisible showman will step
up, and tear it off the wall—as he gave me his best water
color of the Arch, in his first studio show on the South Side
of Washington Square long ago—and insist that you carry
it home under your arm.

ELIZABETH SHEPLEY SERGEANT

--2--

achievement because his power of technical control freed him from the
obligation of thinking of anything but the subject. The etchings often
remind one of the austere beauty of Meryon. Again and again he returns
from excursions into the soft lovelinesses of the blurred dry point
plate to that sharp unveiled integrity of line.

All told his work is significant of an unusual combination
of honesty of vision and poetic fire. There is never a difficulty
shirked. His line is sincere and his color emotional - sometimes ex-
pressed with violence, sometimes with tenderness. There was poetry
and high intelligence in the man and in his work, and his tragic death
cut short a career of great promise.