IotD: Wescott & Wheeler’s Queer Domesticity

While searching online for something else entirely I stumbled across this lovely image of Glenway Wescott (left) and Monroe Wheeler (right) at home.

Taken by their friend painter Bernard Perlin around 1947, it depicts the two men at Stone-blossom, the farmhouse the two men shared. Stone-blossom was located on Wescott’s brother and sister-in-law’s large rural farm in Hampton, New Jersey. Biographer Jerry Rosco has written that the home “balanced Wescott and Wheeler’s world,” and quotes Ralph Pomeroy’s impression of it: “this was an eighteenth-century household, filled with art, music, literature, sculpture, and wonderful talk” (156). Wescott lived there full time while Wheeler, who was director of exhibitions at MOMA, commuted back and forth from New York City.

According to information included on the bernardperlin.com flickr site, the three portraits about the fireplace are silverpoints of Lloyd Wescott, W. Somerset Maugham, and E.M. Forster by Perlin.

Provenance

Wescott and Wheeler at Stone-blossom (circa 1947)
Bernard Perlin
bernardperlin.com flickr site, bernardperlin.com

Works Cited

Rosco, Jerry. Glenway Wescott Personally: A Biography. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin, 2002. Print.

IotD: Pavel Tchelitchew by Cecil Beaton

Russian neo-romantic painter Pavel Tchelitchew photographed with characteristic elegance by Cecil Beaton. The superimposed elements over the portrait not only makes for a lovely visual effect, but also cleverly evokes the neo-romantic impulse to synthesize realist and surrealist modes of artistic representation.

Tchelitchew was the partner of Charles Henri Ford, and as such I have inevitably been learning quite a bit about him through my thesis research process. Their partnership spanned from the early 1930’s until the Russian painter’s death in 1957.

I have been unable to get a pinpoint an exact date or provenance of this portrait, but judging from other photographs I have seen of Tchelitchew, I’d guess this was taken sometime during the 1930’s. If I find more information I will update this post.