Waldo Peirce
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Waldo Peirce (December 17, 1884 - March 8, 1970) was an American painter, born in Bangor, Maine.
For many years, until his death, he was both a prominent painter and a well-known character. He belonged to no particular school of art, which may have diminished his long-term reputation, but was sometimes called "the American Renoir." His style was basically representational, colorful, and lusty, clearly denoting his Rabelaisian love of life. A long-time friend of Ernest Hemingway, of whom he painted the cover picture for Time magazine in 1937, he was once called "the Ernest Hemingway of American painters." To which he replied, "They'll never call Ernest Hemingway the Waldo Peirce of American writers." His reputation as an artist diminished sharply after his death.
The off-spring of wealthy Maine lumber barons, he attended Harvard and, as he once said, never worked a day in his life. He did, however, spend many hours every day for 50 years of his life painting thousands of pictures of his beloved families (he was married 4 times and had numerous children), still lifes, and landscapes. He led a lusty, bohemian life, spending the 1920s in Paris with the so-called Lost Generation celebrities and was as much known for his eccentricities as for his painting. This may well explain why, upon his death at age 86, such a well-known personality virtually vanished from the history of American art even though he is well represented in most of the major American museums.
Peirce was a large man for his time (he was drafted onto the Harvard football team, he said, solely because of his size) and with a mustache and full beard and a large cigar jammed perpetually into his mouth he looked every inch of a cartoonist's notion of an artist. Peirce himself was adamant about one thing: "I'm a painter," he insisted, "not an artist."
His most famous episode occurred just after his graduation from Harvard around 1910. He and his friend John Reed, the American communist who is buried in the Kremlin walls, booked passage together on a freighter from Boston to England. As the ship was leaving Boston Harbor Peirce decided that the accommodations were not to his taste. Without a word to anyone, he jumped off the back of the ship and swam several miles back to shore. Reed was then arrested by the ship's captain for the murder of his vanished travelling companion and thrown into the brig. When the freighter eventually arrived in England, Peirce was at the dock waiting to greet his friend Reed -- he had dried himself off and taken a faster ship to England. A further embellishment to the story is that Peirce had swum in a multi-mile swimming contest at Harvard a few days before. Some of this may actually be true....
Peirce joined the American Field Service, an ambulance corps that served on the French battlefields, in 1915, two years before the entry of the United States into World War I. He was later decorated with the Croix de Guerre by the French government for bravery at Verdun.
His older brother, Hayford, was a noted authority on Byzantine art and one of his wives, Alzira Peirce, also enjoyed a modest reputation as a painter. His nephew, Hayford Peirce, is a science-fiction and mystery writer.