Waldo Peirce (December 17, 1884 - March 8, 1970) was an American painter, born in Bangor, Maine. December 17 is the 351st day of the year (352nd in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar. ... 1884 is a leap year starting on Tuesday (click on link to calendar). ... March 8 is the 67th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (68th in Leap years). ... 1970 was a common year starting on Thursday. ... For the computer graphics program, see Corel Painter. ... Downtown Bangor, Maine Bangor is a city located in Penobscot County, Maine, United States. ...

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. Ernest Hemingway, 1950 Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist and short story writer. ... 8:17 am, August 6, 1945, Japanese time. ...

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. The term Lost Generation was coined by Gertrude Stein to refer to a group of American literary notables who lived in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. ...

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."

The Artist, His Art-Historian Brother, and Respective Wives before a Night at the Bangor Opera

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.... The Artist, His Brother, & Their Respective Wives This picture was taken about 1938 by a friend of the Peirces in Bangor, Maine, and has been in the possession of the Hayford Peirce family since then. ... The Artist, His Brother, & Their Respective Wives This picture was taken about 1938 by a friend of the Peirces in Bangor, Maine, and has been in the possession of the Hayford Peirce family since then. ... John Jack Silas Reed (October 22, 1887 – October 19, 1920) was a journalist and a Communist activist, famous for his first-hand account of the Bolshevik Revolution called Ten Days that Shook the World. ...

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. AFS volunteers and ambulance in World War I. The American Field Service (AFS) was established in 1915 by A. Piatt Andrew, a political economics professor at Harvard University and a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. ... Ypres, 1917, in the vicinity of the Battle of Passchendaele. ... The Croix de guerre is a military decoration of both Belgium and France which was first created in 1915. ... Battle of Verdun Conflict World War I Date 21 February 1916 – 19 December 1916 Place Verdun, France Result Stalemate They shall not pass — Robert Nivelle The Battle of Verdun was a major battle of the Western Front in World War I. The battle was fought between the German and French...

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. Hayford Peirce (born January 7, 1942, Bangor, Maine) is a writer of science fiction, mysteries, and spy thrillers. ...

External Links

Waldo Peirce at the Schneider Museum of Art, Southern Oregon University, Ashland, Oregon [1] The Plaza Ashland is a city in Jackson County, Oregon, near Interstate 5 and the California border. ...