Bourbon & Old Salt

Painter Tom Benton, clad only in a pair of blue jeans, was busy getting in his hay on Martha's Vineyard when the good news arrived. Boston's Museum of Fine Arts had just spent $2,000 for Benton's latest portrait, New England Editor (see cut). It had been some time since the champing champion of American-school painting had received such a boost.

The man who posed for the Editor was Benton's Vineyard buddy, 78-year-old George Anthony Hough, whose son Henry runs the Vineyard Gazette and wrote a best-seller about it (Country Editor).

Benton had been wanting to paint salty, sociable old ex-Editor Hough for quite a while, he said, "but I figured I'd have to lead him up to it gradually. We were having some bourbon and cistern water at his place when I told him, 'By God, I'm going to paint your picture.' We had a good time at it. After we were finished for the day we'd have a drink and then I'd take him home and we'd have another drink."

Some museumgoers wished that Benton had done his drinking before starting to paint. To them, his portrait looked as inert and uninspired as a coil of rope. But the conservative officials of Boston's museum seemed to feel that Benton had captured a vanishing type on canvas. And for once, Tom Benton, who used to complain that an art museum was a graveyard "run by a pretty boy with delicate wrists and a swing in his gait," agreed with the officials. His friend Hough, said Benton, "is a good old New England editor."

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