PUBLIC FAVORITES (31)

JAMES CHAPIN, 66, is among the nation's best portraitists, yet his art is seldom shown and his name seldom heard.

One reason is that Chapin is at his best painting not notables, but the unknowns who happen to move him. His obvious purpose is to make each of his subjects more than a mere personality on canvas; he tries to express ways and qualities of life. For example, Chapin's Ruby Green Singing (opposite) tries to portray "the beauty of Negro music and the Negro people." The grandeur of this idea belies the surface simplicity of the painting. Whether or not the picture communicates as much as Chapin hoped it would, it does find a responsive chord in a great many people. Ruby Green is the public favorite in a deep-South museum: the Norton Gallery at West Palm Beach, Fla.

In 1922 Painter Chapin got fed up with Greenwich Village and outgrew his own imitations of Cezanne. He found a $4-a-month log cabin in northern New Jersey, holed in there for five decisive years. Chapin emerged from the hills with portraits, as sharp and solid as plowshares, of the hard-bitten farm people among whom he had lived. Shortly after his return, in Manhattan, Chapin happened to see a young Negro girl named Ruby Green singing in the Hall Johnson Choir and did her portrait (as Ruby Greene--absent-minded Painter Chapin misspelled her name--she now has a small part in the Manhattan revival of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess). His work is as clearly in the American grain as that of Thomas Benton and Grant Wood, and happily free of both Benton's swagger and Wood's snigger.

Nowadays Chapin lives with his wife and two sons in a pre-Revolutionary house "on a lot of land" in Glen Gardner, N.J. Seven mornings a week he paints, and "since the house is so old, there's always work to do in the afternoon. I do enough gardening so the boys can have fresh vegetables. Sometimes I play a little tennis. It's a very pleasant life."

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