"Waldo Peirce, 85, American Impressionist painter, a bewhiskered giant of a man noted as much for his exuberant lifestyle as for his bold, spontaneous art; of pneumonia . . . Peirce lived with all the verve and gusto of his lifelong friend and traveling companion Ernest Hemingway, even to the point of taking four wives and running with the bulls in Pamplona. His splashy, sensuously colored paintings, said one critic, 'smell of sweat and sound like laughter.'" (Time, March 23, 1970)
Waldo (everyone called him Waldo through out his life) had a rather typical childhood in turn-of-the-century Bangor, fishing, camping, and hunting with his father and brother, and watching the lumber-laden schooners sail off down the Penobscot River
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Waldo was a bright fellow, but an indifferent student, attending a few prep schools and taking six years to graduate from Harvard in 1909. (He claimed he "majored in pool," playing upstairs at the Leavitt and Peirce Smoke Shop in Cambridge, where one can still find his comical, illustrated poem about the poolroom.) Over six feet tall, Waldo lettered on the football team and remained an active, accomplished sportsman throughout his life -- a vigorous swimmer, tennis player, golfer, and a lifelong, avid fisherman, but primarily he was known as a prolific American artist and bon vivant.
Living in Paris off and on from 1910 to 1931, Waldo was immersed in the artistic culture of the '20s. He began his studies at the Academe Julien, where he quickly distinguished himself as a versatile, passionate painter. Later, while studying with the Spanish Impressionist Ignacio Zuloaga, in Segovia, he married a fellow student, Dorothy Rice, a spirited crackerjack of a woman who drove a motorcycle and "dressed like a gypsy." Unfortunately, Rice's mother remained very prominent in her life, prompting Waldo to refer to his mother-in-law as "the umbilicus." Waldo cut off this marriage and the umbilicus in 1918. He would marry four times.
Waldo found early success in Paris with his Impressionist paintings as well as with commissions for portraits. Early in his career, he showed a remarkable sensitivity and eventually his palette was filled with vibrant colors. In 1915, in New York City, his works were exhibited along with those of John Sloan, George Bellows, and Edward Hopper.
World War I interrupted his career. Waldo volunteered for the American Field Service Ambulance Corps in 1915, joining the growing number of young American men, many Ivy League graduates, who flocked to France to support the country in its hour of need. Waldo was sometimes viewed as a Rabelaisian character lacking in sensitivity, but one has only to read his contributions to the memorial volume The Friends of France, where one finds passages comparable to those in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, to realize the depth of his concern, caring, and empathy for his stricken friends and fallen soldiers.
Waldo was supported by his family throughout his time in France -- his father supplying the funds and his mother giving the emotional and intellectual support of love, good sense, wit, and curiosity through her frequent letters.
Anna, his mother, was an accomplished linguist, traveler, photographer, and, up until her death in 1928, seemed to write to Waldo just about every other day. This voluminous correspondence, most housed at the Library of Congress, is a treasure chest for any biographer. Anna's side of the conversation kept Waldo informed of the goings-on in Bangor, i.e., the deaths of friends, the health of his beloved dogs, the coming of the circus announced by a loud steam piano, and her constant admiration of Waldo's paintings covering the walls of her home.
Waldo lived for many years in Paris at 77 rue de Lille, in a magnificent apartment and studio overlooking the Seine. He knew everyone in the city, moving easily between the artist/writer community and the embassy crowd populated by Harvard graduates. He dined and drank with James Joyce, once telling Nora Joyce that "Jim should leave out the swear words." Among the other notables were Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, Ford Maddox Ford, Archibald MacLeish, and Ernest Hemingway, who would become a lifelong friend.
It is not clear just when and where Waldo first met Hemingway. On April 26, 1927, Waldo wrote to his mother:
"Did you read The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway? A good novel of the Latin Quarter and the derelicts of the war -- that lost generation -- they are real people, friends or acquaintances of mine . . . I tried to get Hemingway to dinner with all his characters of the SAR . . . One of the year's bestsellers . . . They all got drunk even as in the book and [they] didn't show up."
Although the details of their meeting remain a mystery, what is clear is that in July 1927, Waldo and Hemingway journeyed to Pamplona (without their wives) and began a solid friendship. Hemingway's biographers give little information about these two weeks, but Waldo, never without a sketchbook, captured the fiesta in a collection of images, line drawings, watercolors, and also photographs, many of them now owned by Colby College.
In addition to developing into an accomplished artist, Waldo wrote ribald poems and ballads. Scribner's once considered publishing the pieces, but Charles Scribner felt the public was not ready for the risqué tone of the doggerel. His classmate Max Perkins, and Hemingway's editor at Scribner's, once gave Waldo a $500 advance to write his autobiography, but it was never completed even though a young Barbara McKernan (former Governor John McKernan's mother) was hired in an attempt to keep Waldo on the job.
Before leaving Paris, Waldo had already married and divorced his second wife, Ivy Troutman, an actress, whom he later referred to as "Poison Ivy." He was now married to his third wife, Alzira Boehm, who delivered twin boys at the American Hospital in Paris. By an odd twist of fate, a nurse in attendance at their birth later came to Bangor and married Charles Bragg, a very prominent citizen of the town.
In the 1930s, Waldo, Alzira, and their children (the twin boys and now a daughter, Anna) lived in Bangor, in a home across the street from his parents' Cedar Street mansion. Waldo began to settle down, and his career as an artist flourished for a number of years. He was a local, beloved celebrity, if an eccentric one: He was never much of a dresser, often going shoeless, using a rope for a belt. Kids in the city would cry, "There goes Whiskers-the-Artist."
After leaving Paris in 1931, Waldo often visited Hemingway in Key West, where they fished in the clear waters for tarpon. One of Waldo's many portraits of Hemingway from this period, Kid Balzac, is prominently displayed in the Hemingway Collection Room at the JFK Library. Time magazine commissioned Waldo to paint Hemingway in 1937, the year To Have and to Have Not was published. In the portrait, reminiscent of the style of Matisse, Hemingway's face is oddly shaped, peering intently upon a fishing line.
Waldo's career continued to flourish throughout the 1930s. He exhibited with Andrew Wyeth, George Bellows, and other artists. His Haircut by the Sea was added to the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Other works were placed in a number of museums. He was very generous in donating paintings to museums as well as to friends.
While Waldo enjoyed some financial success as an artist, he was still supported in the 1930s by his father. (His mother had died in 1928.) When his father died in 1936, he left Waldo a sizeable fortune, allowing him to live extremely well. The family's business was run by Waldo's brother Hayford, who had fought in WWI and was a published Byzantine art scholar.
Over his lifetime, Waldo's technique and style changed, reflecting various influences. Early on, it was the Impressionists, especially Cézanne. His paintings of multipattern interiors, clothing, and carpets reveal a strong Matisse flavor. His roly-poly children suggest a taste for Renoir. Later in life, he could be placed with the Regionalists, who painted scenes of everyday life, play, and work.
In 1946, Waldo married again, and with his fourth wife, Ellen Larsen, he moved to Searsport with two more children, Jonathan and Karen, into a stately home that is now the Carriage House Inn. He remained an active painter, often seen around town with a sketchbook in hand.
In his later years, Waldo assumed the position of the grand old man of Maine painting. He received a Doctorate of Art from Colby College, won prizes, illustrated children's books, painted every day, and wrote daily letters to a list of friends -- a list that reads like a Who's Who of the Century. He would often illustrate the envelopes with witty watercolors.
Waldo and Hemingway met for the final time in Tucson, Arizona, in March 1959. Two years later, hearing of Hemingway's death, Waldo immediately told his wife, Ellen, that Hemingway had committed suicide. He knew the initial story of an accident was false. Mary Hemingway continued to correspond with Waldo after Hemingway's death, giving tidbits related to the donation of the Hemingway papers to the Kennedy Library, sharing her feelings on Hemingway's death, and giving details about the making of A Moveable Feast.
Sadly, in later life, Waldo did not continue to receive the recognition that other artists of his era enjoyed. His sister-in-law, Polly Brown Peirce, perhaps gave the best reason for this. According to her son, Hayford Peirce Jr., she felt that Waldo had too much money to be a great artist. While Polly always admired Waldo's full-time devotion to his art, in spite of the fact he didn't really have to do it, she felt he could have been greater if financial reasons had forced him to focus more on the commercial side of art or look a little deeper into his soul.
While some indeed argue that later in life Waldo lost an edge to his work -- producing more and more flowers in a bucket, his favorite theme -- one only has to view his portraits of loved ones to realize he never lost the ability to capture the essence of the individual and to render it in a carefully worked piece full of love and color. His daughter Anna is captured outside a window in Anna with Flowers, one of his most Impressionistic paintings. He worked prolifically, producing thousands of drawings and paintings over his lifetime, well into his 80s.
Waldo Peirce's remarkable life and eclectic body of work expanded the definition of "colorful." While his reputation faded somewhat after his death, he was a larger-than-life figure to those who knew him. Once, Hemingway asked his young son, Jack, "Who is the greatest man you know?" -- expecting to hear "Papa." Instead, Jack replied, "It's Waldo." Professor Vincent Hartgen, founder of the UMaine art department, once said, "Waldo was a good painter, but he was a great man."
When Waldo Peirce died in 1970, his obituary was carried in papers across the country. He is buried in Bangor's Mount Hope Cemetery, next to his mother. If Waldo were to rise from the dead, he would undoubtedly get straight to work: He would set up his easel, fire up his pipe, and, if the light were right, paint the sun's golden reflections that color the Penobscot River where he once fished as a boy.
SIDEBAR: Where's Waldo?
During his lifetime, Waldo Peirce's work was acquired by most of the country's major art museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, the Gallery of American Arts, and many, many others. Regionally, there are many places where his work can be enjoyed. Here are a few:
- The University of Maine Museum of Art (UMMA) is home to a number of oils and watercolors; one finds his paintings mounted on walls throughout the campus. Pond Street School hangs in the provost's office.
- About a dozen or so donated paintings hang in the library of the middle school in Searsport, where Peirce and his family lived for many years. Other places in Searsport where you can see his work are the Carriage House Inn and the Penobscot Marine Museum.
- The Bangor Public Library owns a number of paintings, including the processional scene hanging in the reference room, a portrait of his uncle Luther mounted from time to time outside the director's office, and a very large painting of peasants in the stairwell leading to the children's reading room.
- The Bangor Jewish Council was gifted two paintings, both done in Tunisia where Waldo and his third wife, Ivy, wintered for a couple of years: a sensitive portrait of an Arab elder, and a magnificent painting of the walled city of Hammamet.
- A number of private collections of his works exist throughout the Bangor area. The Bangor Museum and Center for History is planning an exhibition of the work of Waldo Peirce in the spring of 2006.
