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by Glenn Harrington
Almost everyone I've met in my 30 years of residing in Bucks County beams like a child when prompted to talk about the beauty and history of our region. Our inspiring countryside has set a bucolic stage for countless writers, gardeners, musicians and painters, and I've often drawn from this vibrant palette when painting for the publishing world. I've been featuring our local landscapes, waterways, and colorful people for decades in my work (sometimes clandestinely). For example, I painted Daniel Garber's Cuttalossa grape arbor for Gallo Wines and Upper Black Eddy’s towering shale cliffs for Zane Grey's novel George Washington Frontiersman. I also used a Lumberville interior as the setting for George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman. Bucks County people were used for My America and Matt, Tom Sawyer, a W.B. Yeats book of poetry, and I even used the Doylestown Santa Clause as the ruddy-nosed front man for a Texas wine label.
I've met more interesting people while strolling down my obscure little dirt road here in Bucks County than I ever met while out walking in New York City. I’ve met pilots, doctors, artists, bikers, hikers, adventurers, GPS-lost drivers, and the director of a national gallery I had hoped one day to join (and eventually did!). It's the same narrow, beech-lined road that historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. navigated on his way to a martini and a burger with my neighbor Fred Israel when they collaborated on books. It’s the dusty trail that humorist S.J. Perelman trekked to show his friend a home for sale in the 1970s. (The friend didn't buy it, but the man in the back seat did--my friend Fred, an accomplished historian who wrote books on presidents, had an audience with the Pope, managed the Gallop Poll for decades and wrote for President Ronald Regan's radio show; Fred bought his home after republishing the 1897 Sears and Roebuck Catalogue for which S.J. Perelman wrote the introduction.
Fred's magnificent stone home was the Manor House on our country road. Built in 1827, it's a classic Bucks County estate that master masons built from local shale and argillite. Inside the house was an enormous fireplace with inset pine side drawers, racks for antique rifles above the mantle and an adornment of early-American political flags (later entrusted to the Smithsonian institution).
I was instantly visited by thoughts of that fireplace when New Library Books asked me to paint the cover for George Elliott's Silas Marner. A friend's daughter came to mind when I scouted for a child to pose in front of the hearth. (Her dad, Dave, was, after all, the model for Captain Morgan, the famed rum picaroon. You'll see his colossal figure at Super Bowls and celebrated rum events around the world.) Dave's young daughter Isabella was perfect the Silas Marner part. He cradled her like a kitten into Fred's home, craning and dropping her into position in front of the fireplace. At first I couldn't cajole Isabella to cooperate in our little classic scheme. To sway her, I took from my pocket one of my son's mud-covered army-green toy soldiers. I snapped pictures while she waged a silent war in miniature on the carpet. (I painted out the soiled plastic soldier in the final painting.) Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice followed shortly thereafter.
Herb Ward was descended from the Montgomery Ward retail fortune and owned the Black Bass Hotel in Lumberville. The establishment had been a notorious Tory hangout during the Revolutionary War. Herb kept up the Brit influence by filling the 1700s-era inn with English tins, china, decorative enameled boxes, plates and figurines, many bearing the Queen's image. He donated the collection to the Queen at the end of his life. Bantam Books, in tandem with BBC productions, hired me to paint the covers for a series of classic books-on-tape performed by top British actors. Recalling a period fireplace at the Black Bass, Herb's historic stage came to mind for Pride and Prejudice. I hired my friend, Janelle, to model as Lizzy, rented a dress from Tony at Cargill’s Costumes, and paddled down River Road to meet with Herb, who was a delight to talk with. He told engaging stories as he ascended the inn's carpeted stairs, perching halfway up and spilling his slight frame over the banister while he sang stories of a Metropolitan Opera star, of Angela Lansbury, and a host of Black Bass Hall of Famers who frequented the Inn over the years. After Herb died, I attended a luncheon in his honor and presented his portrait to a group of his closest friends. All had been benefactors of his largess throughout their lives. The portrait hung in the inn for many years.
D.H. Lawrence's ground-breaking classic novel Women in Love was next. At the time, I had begun a series of local sycamore-tree paintings, joined a gallery in Manhattan, and sent them one to display. ”We don't sell tree paintings here in the city, but we'll give it a try,” came the response. It sold in a week.
I revisited the sycamore scene on the Delaware River for Woman in Love. Bantam approved the finished painting, but asked that I add a couple canoodling in the shrubs. But where to find a couple willing to pose under such conditions? So it was that in the middle of a frigid February, with the snow still crusty in my Tinicum yard, I suggested to my wife that we don bathing suits and pose for the parts ourselves. She disappeared. I pleaded through the locked bedroom door that if she'd just comply with my chilly proposition; the income might magically transform our drab lentil-soup dinners into juicy rib-eye steaks. Grudgingly, but interested in the steaks, she timidly emerged in her bathing suit. We posed in the brittle shrubs, defrosted, and were on rib eyes for a month.
Disney Publishing saw the same Delaware River sycamore painting I'd sold in Manhattan, and asked if I'd paint Tarzan in the same style for their children's book. Eight months and 40 paintings later, I staggered from my studio wild-haired and exhausted, and we were back on the rib-eye steaks for months. With Tarzan, I challenged myself in the manner of Al Hirschfeld, the Broadway artist who'd hidden the name of his daughter, Nina, in all of his theater drawings. I concealed the names of my sons, Evan and Sean, in many of the paintings (Mom was reserved for the title page). Disney never noticed (not a word, please).
Book covers in the BBC series continued with Room with a View, Wuthering Heights, Dangerous Liaisons, and Mansfield Park. The cover of Henry James' The Golden Bowl is graced with a likeness of my friend Janelle, who once ran a Doylestown dance studio, and whose graceful beauty appeared again on the cover of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.
Lentil soup was back on the menu while I spent most of the next year illustrating William Shakespeare, Poetry for Young People for Sterling Publishing. Excerpts from many of Shakespeare's various plays and sonnets were chosen by Editor David Scott Kastan, professor of English at Yale University, and co-edited by his 13-year-old daughter, Marina. I read most all of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets before starting the sketches, and fell in love with his work (though I must admit to resorting to Shakespeare for Dummies when printing deadlines pressed.) I employed petite local ballet beauties, the Fehrs sisters, to decorate the paintings with sprites, fairies and dryads, dressing them in diaphanous fabrics and casting them in the parts of Queen Mab, Puck and Ariel as they floated across my summer lawn. With scent of a rib eye, I even lured my wife Christine out of retirement and onto the stage for a cameo as Portia in the Merchant of Venice.
That popular children's book has been translated and reproduced in many languages around the world, and is still in print all these years later. Two of the original paintings were purchased by a local Bucks County screenwriter who wrote the films Mona Lisa's Smile, Flicker, and Planet of the Apes.
But of all the local people that I've painted for publication, perhaps the most colorful and well recognized was a man from Doylestown named Al. When a Texas winery first contacted me about creating a wine label for their Classic Christmas Vintage, I had to admit I didn't know much about Texas wines (and still don't). “Santa as sommelier,” they requested, “tipping and sniffing at a glass of wine.” On a November day, purely by chance, I entered Tinicum Park for a Saturday festival, and saw the top of a Santa Clause hat moving in the distant crowd. I rushed home for camera and a wine glass. When I returned, Al was lowering himself into his tiny Ford. I asked if I could snap his picture before he sledded off. Reluctantly, he reemerged. Pushing my luck, I asked if he wouldn't mind posing with a wine glass in his mitten.
“Sure,” he said. “What's this for?”
I told him that it was to be reference for a Santa painting, that he would be featured on a wine label. He lifted the empty glass, squinted into the sun and stated, “Five bucks!”
I laughed. “Five bucks, that's my commission,” he said.
But Al was serious. I searched my pockets while he offered that he had been the Doylestown Santa for many years, and that each year he had gotten a cold for Christmas--and was through with the job! I handed him a crumpled five.
A few years later, after Al had passed, my local gallery told me Al's daughter had been in and seen her father's portrait. She studied the painting with tears in her eyes, realizing the sniffling, tippling Santa was indeed her dad.
Glenn Harrington’s work can be viewed at glennharrington.com. His Art for Print paintings will be exhibited for sale in November at the Silverman Gallery in Buckingham silvermangallery.com.