I DIDN’T LIKE Russell Cheney at first. I encountered him through F. O. Matthiessen, his more famous younger partner. Matthiessen is credited with founding the discipline of American Studies, and he was the author of the classic text American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941). He and Cheney, an American Impressionist painter, were a gay couple who lived in Kittery, Maine, very close to where I grew up. That fact, plus Matthiessen’s literary reputation, intrigued me. Cheney seemed important only by association.
I began reading their correspondence, a selection of which was published in Rat and the Devil: Journal Letters of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney (1978). (“Rat” and “Devil” were their nicknames for one another.) The men exchanged roughly 3,000 letters between first meeting aboard the Paris crossing the Atlantic in 1924 and Cheney’s death in 1945. Matthiessen’s letters were intimate, reflective, and literary. They popped with insights. Cheney, an heir to a silk manufacturing dynasty, seemed more breezily patrician: “I stayed at this hotel”; “I had lunch at that restaurant.” His apparent superficiality bored me, but only at first.
Yet Cheney captured a bleak, stark side of New England, too. His darker paintings, among his best, may well have been a response to Matthiessen’s urging him to explore all of his life experiences. In Depot Square (1927), for instance, an empty automobile is parked outside the train station in Portsmouth. There are hints that the scene supports life—or once did so—such as the parked car, but the balance of images suggests an absence of people. The car is empty; no smoke rises from the chimneys of buildings; and the telephone poles look like denuded trees. It is somewhat surprising that this scion of a wealthy manufacturing family should prove to be such a sensitive chronicler of New England noir. Where Cheney really distinguished himself was in his portraits of working-class men. Given his family’s wealth and social connections, Cheney had easy access to prominent subjects such as Katharine Hepburn. But his indifference to women is obvious. Even the unmistakable Hepburn is almost unrecognizable in his painting of her. On the other hand, his paintings of working-class men are objectively better: more expressive, more complex, and technically superior. It’s almost as if Cheney couldn’t flip the switch and paint for money alone. Beginning in late 1929, for example, he spent time in Santa Fe, where he befriended the Hoen family, who ran a garage where he got his Ford serviced. Soon into their friendship, Cheney painted Paul Hoen’s portrait, which is now owned by the Wadsworth Athenæum. In this portrait he managed to achieve something similar to the landscapes that capture the bleaker side of New England life. Hoen’s face is care-worn, a rough and ravaged face. He looks down and does not make eye contact with the viewer. Cheney communicated all of this straightforwardly, but with compassion. In April 1930, Cheney wrote enthusiastically to Matthiessen: “I am certain this picture of Paul Hoen is my most direct achievement. My complete indifference to its technical quality is what I’ll stand by or fall by. It’s as natural as breathing.” And this resonated powerfully with Matthiessen, who replied: “Your extraordinary poignant letter about your painting and your new feeling towards it has been throbbing through me all day. How you can invigorate me feller when you write like that. It’s just as though you poured new hot blood into my veins.” Often Cheney’s portraits of working-class men speak to a definite gay sensibility. One of the most reproduced paintings in Cheney’s œuvre is his Howard Lathrop (1937). Lathrop was a local fisherman from Portsmouth, whom Cheney and Matthiessen had befriended. In the painting Lathrop stands with his work gloves in his hands (suggestively shaped, colored, and positioned above his groin) with the cityscape of Portsmouth behind him. But it’s Lathrop’s face and eyes that spoke to me. His handsome good looks and bright, sensitive eyes belie his rough workman’s clothes, as if to say: You never know when and where you’ll come across a “special amici”—Cheney’s term for gay men. And then there’s Kenneth Hill (1937), who looks as though he was a longshoreman, cap cocked rakishly to one side, smoking a cigarette, also handsome, a James Dean type, but also not quite what you’d expect. Hill’s crossed legs, the way he holds his cigarette—my first reaction was to think that Cheney had painted another gay man. In an essay on the poet John Crowe Ransom in 1948, Matthiessen implied that minor artists are essential to culture by adding variety. Cheney was just such an artist, and a very good one, who deserves more recognition than he has received. Not only did he capture and express a place and region, but he did the same with the harshness of working-class life and with being gay. And this was before “gay” scarcely existed as a word or concept. It took me a while to figure out that Russell Cheney did more than have sex with someone more famous than himself, but I was well rewarded when I did.
Scott Bane’s journalism has appeared inHuffington Post, Santa Fe New Mexican, andPoets & Writers. He lives in New York.
