Parson Will

Many a U. S. officer attached to British and Canadian divisions in 1917-18 remembers a small Official Artist with gleaming spectacles and a serious expression who wandered about Division Headquarters in a shaggy goatskin tunic and trench helmet drawing pictures of Generals. Those who talked with him discovered that he knew an enormous number of famous people. Intellectuals realized that this little man was the Will Rothenstein celebrated in Max Beerbohm's Enoch Soames. When the first volume of his autobiography appeared in the U. S. last month,* readers had a chance to learn something of a man who is still comparatively unknown to the general public, though he has had his paintings hung in dozens of museums from Chicago, Ill. to Peshawar, India and has assiduously hunted celebrities for 40 years. The celebrities he hunts are always intellectual: artists, writers, professors, scientists. He pays little attention to tycoons or statesmen. Every few years he does a new picture of his friend George Bernard Shaw.

Sir William Rothenstein (knighted last year) was born in Yorkshire in 1872, the son of a prosperous cloth merchant. At the age of 16 he left grammar school to be an artist, studied at the Slade School in London under Alphonse Legros, a meticulous draughtsman and a pupil of Ingres. The Ingres-Legros influence is still obvious in Rothenstein's drawing. A preternaturally solemn youth of 17 in a long black frock coat, he went to Paris to enter the Academic Julian.

Already he was developing his faculty for meeting and making friends with great men. Sober-faced Will Rothenstein was as thrilled at chatting with Degas, dining at the Cafe Royal with Oscar Wilde, going to the Moulin Rouge with Toulouse-Lautrec, as a young U. S. executive might be at lunching with Sidney Zollicoffer Mitchell or Albert Wiggin. After four years in Paris he was sent to Oxford to do a series of portraits of famed Oxonians. Wrote his friend Max Beerbohm:

"In the Summer Term of '93 a bolt from the blue flashed down on Oxford. . . . Dons and undergraduates stood around, rather pale, discussing nothing but it. Whence came it, this meteorite? From Paris. ... Its aim? To do a series of 24 portraits in lithograph. . . . He was 21 years old. He wore spectacles that flashed more than any pair ever seen. He was a wit. He was brimful of ideas. He knew Whistler. He knew Edmond de Goncourt. He knew everyone in Paris. He knew them all by heart. He was Paris in Oxford."

Rothenstein's Oxford Characters established him as a pencil-portraitist of the first rank, but though he painted nudes, landscapes, Cheapside costers, his lithographer's pencil has always been reserved for the faces of the great and near-great. For a Briton to be the subject of a Rothenstein portrait or a Beerbohm caricature is like membership in the Institut de France to a Frenchman. In 1899 he married Alice Knewstub, a beautiful young lady who played leads opposite Sir Herbert Tree.

The Rothenstein autobiography contains many a Rothenstein portrait, innumerable anecdotes of his famed friends. Immaculate James McNeill Whistler always called him "Parson." Rothenstein's frantic efforts to keep Verlaine sober at Oxford are fully described. Walter Pater was grievously hurt at Parson Will's drawing of him, asked his friends privately "Do I look like a Barbary ape?"

With most of his friends, Oscar Wilde in particular, Parson Will was more gentle. Sympathetically he reports Oscar's attempts to reform after his release from jail; the loyalty of his great friend and literary executor, Robert ("Robbie") Ross; Wilde's gratitude at the public reception of The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

*MEN AND MEMORIES, Recollections of (Sir) William Rothenstein, 1872-1900--Coward McCann ($5).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.