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Nancy Bowditch writes of artist father, George Brush

By MARIAN MITCHELL
RECOLLECTIONS OF A JOYOUS PAINTER
Nancy Douglas Bowditch
Noone House, Peterborough, N.H.

As one of the pupils of her artist father, George de Forest Brush, who has earned the reputation as one of America's most celebrated-portrait painters, Nancy Douglas Bowditch has written a warm account of her growing up years under her father's tutelage in the leisurely era of pre-World War I days.

Nancy was the oldest of this American artist's six daughters and remembers the many literary and artistic figures who were frequent visitors in her parents' home, among them Mark Twain, Henry George, Barry Faulkner, Augustus St. Gaudens, Alan Seeger and John Singer Sargent.

While Brush continued a deep sympathy throughout his lifetime for the American Indian, after his marriage to Mary Taylor Whelpley in 1886, his interest in the mother and child theme became paramount; and it is with such of his works that "Joyous Painter" is punctuated. 

A brilliant light and dark reproduction of his "Modern Madonna" painted in 1919 with blonde daughter Thea provides the front cover of the 240-page biography.
 
George Brush took his family, his wife and their six daughters and son everywhere with him: summers in their teepee camp in Cornish, N.H. an apartment in .New York with skyscraper studio, a rainy spring in the Cotswald hills of England, a temporary home with flagstone courtyard in the village of Marlotte, France and back to America. 

There were train trips to Quebec, winters in Scarborough, NY and eventually q thriving farm and permanent home in Dublin, N.H., from which there were periodic trips abroad. 

In her foreword Mrs. Bowditch explains that "in spite of a nomadic existence, the entire family circle was held closely together all during childhood, no matter where we lived. In fact, after he married, my father's life and his work were virtually inseparable from his family: we were the subjects of many of his paintings: we became accustomed to being in his studio from earliest childhood."

It was the artist's friend, Charles C. Burlingham, who called George de Forest Brush "a joyous painter: a great artist and an expert in living life. He as a master of his art, and he perceived and revealed the beauty of the human countenance, especially the loveliness of women and children."

The author states that her son is compiling a catalogue encompassing as nearly as possible the full range of her father's work. The son referred to is, of course, George De Forest Bowditch, curator of the Adirondack Museum, Blue Mountain N.Y., who from 1963 to 1966 was director of New Bedford's Whaling Musum of the Old Dartmouth Historical Society and who lived with his family during that period in Mattapoisett. 

Member of a family tinged with greatness, the present New York curator is the son of the late Dr. Harold Bowditch, a prominent Boston physician, and the great-great-grandson of Nathaniel Bowditch. The Bay Stater who taught the art of navigation to the seamen of the world. 
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