Writerly People

Boris Artzybasheff
Arnold Toynbee
1947
gouache on board
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

René Bouché
W.H. Auden
1962
oil on canvas
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Boris Chaliapin
Phyllis McGinley
1965
oil on canvas
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Boris Chaliapin
Rebecca West
1947
gouache on board
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

James Chapin
Boris Pasternak
1958
oil on panel
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

John Collier
Karl Marx
1977
pastel on paper
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Mirko Ilic
Anatoly Rybakov
1988
screenprint
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Alex Katz
John Updike
1982
oil on canvas
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Douglas Kirkland
Erma Bombeck
1984
C-print
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

R.B. Kitaj
George Orwell
1983
pastel on paper
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Henry Koerner
Sylvia Porter
1960
oil on canvas
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

James Marsh
P.D. James
1986
acrylic on canvas
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Sidney Nolan
Robert Lowell
1967
watercolor and crayon on paper
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Christopher Ogden
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
1974
C-print
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Robert Vickrey
J.D. Salinger
1961
gouache on board
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Edward Weston
Robinson Jeffers
1932
photogravure
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Samuel Woolf
Thomas Mann
1934
charcoal on paper
(commissioned by Time magazine)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

from Ibis

[A Curse]

Let th'earth deny thee fruit, and stream

    his waters holde from thee:

Let every winde deny fitte blastes

    for thy commoditie.

Let not the Sun shine bright on thee,

    nor glistering Moone by night:

And of thy eyes let glimsing Starres

    forsake the wished sight.

Let not the fire graunt thee his heate,

    nor Ayre humiditie:

Let neither earth nor yet the Sea

    free passage grant to thee.

That banyshed and poore thou mayst

    straunge houses seek in vayne:

That craving too, with trembling voice

    small almes mayst obtaine.

That neither sound of body, nor 

    thy mynde in perfect plight:

This night be worse than passed day,

    and next day than this night. 

That thou mayst still be pitifull,

    but pitied of none:

And that no man nor woman may

    for thy mischaunces mone.

– Ovid (43 BC-AD 17), translated by Thomas Underdown (1569)