Tamea, the bewitching queen of the South Sea isle of Riva, kissed Dan twice within 5 minutes of meeting him. Maisie, on the other hand, Dan's reliable and steadfast girlfriend from America, permitted Dan to kiss her just once in twelve years.
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| by Dean Cornwell, from Cosmopolitan Magazine, 1923 |
In the story, Never The Twain Shall Meet by Peter Kyne, Dan is torn between his passion for Tamea and his loyalty to Maisie.
In the end, Tamea makes the choice for Dan. She loves him, but nobly sends him back to Maisie because she knows he wouldn't be happy for long with the free life on her tropical island. He grew up in a culture of restraint, control and Christian values. The cultures were just too different, and "never the twain shall meet."
When Tamea rejects Dan and sends him back to Maisie, he breaks down sobbing:
At the end of of the story, we witness Dan returning to America with Maisie, but staring thoughtfully back to Riva as it disappears in the distance:
Here's the story behind the story: the illustrator Dean Cornwell married Miss Mildred Kirkham in 1918. The couple had cultural differences of their own. For one thing, Mildred was morally opposed to drinking alcohol. For another, Mildred didn't enjoy traveling. She preferred to stay close to home in NewYork city while Cornwell loved the great outdoors and exploring the American West. Soon Cornwell was working overseas, and was known to have had romantic relationships with other women.
After Cornwell's illustrations for Never The Twain Shall Meet were published, the canvases were returned to his studio. Cornwell revisited his painting of Dan and Maisie sailing away and decided to change the outcome. He painted over the face of Maisie with the face of his own mistress.
In this way, art permitted Cornwell a tiny rebellion against the fate of the fictional character, Dan.
That is very interesting! Thank you.
ReplyDeleteCornwell was so awesome. He doesn't get the credit he deserves.
ReplyDeleteGreat closeups of the original. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteAmazing how deftly Cornwell painted in that new head. Can't even tell. Meanwhile Cornwell (et al) believed that the head should always be painted first, and worked out from.
He certainly improved the head, as the earlier version was stiff and not attuned to the wind blowing her cloak.
Cornwell said he could paint a better head from imagination than life, but doing it from imagination took longer. But here, it looks to me like the original stiff head was from imagination and the later, better head from life.
Cornwell Stories:
Harvey Dunn said that when Cornwell was in his class at Leonia circa 1916 he would often see him out on dates and always with different girls. And he realized that, there was romantic interest there, but Cornwell was also studying the effects of moonlight on the skin, the girls' facial features, their swaying movements and how their clothes hung from their bodies. He said this half-jokingly, but he was also not kidding.
Cornwell brought Nicolai Fechin to New York, introduced him around, got him gallery connections and a teaching position, and so on. Then went after his wife. One of the reasons why Fechin moved to Taos... without his wife.
Cornwell used one particular model a lot in his art, and that was his steady mistress. When Cornwell died, his widow decided to symbolically carve that interloping lady's legacy out of both her marred life and Cornwell's art. The result was a bunch of Cornwell's female figures and faces, excised from their original canvases, ended up being gathered up by illustration students from the incinerator of his apartment building.
I’d never heard of Dean Cornwell until now. Looked him up…incredible
ReplyDeletework. The way he uses white is just extraordinary. Thanks David.
Who was the mistress, and is there a photo of her? Do we know for a fact that he intended to paint the mistress’s face? Could it not be that the particular phenotype or physiognomy spoke to him at that point in his life, both romantically and aesthetically?
ReplyDeleteRichard-- As Kev notes, Cornwell had more than one mistress over the years, and more than one of them modeled for him (which may explain the lure that attracted beautiful women to a skinny guy with glasses). Perhaps the best proof we have of what "THE" mistress looked like is from the paintings that Mrs. Cornwell broke over her knee in a rage. She seemed to know exactly what she was looking for.
ReplyDeleteKev Ferrara-- Thanks for the interesting Cornwell stories. You mention his observation of moonlight on a woman's skin; about 10 years ago I wrote about that first painting of Tamea and Dan on the bench because I was so impressed with the way that Cornwell showed us it was a moonlit scene without ever showing us the moon or the stars or a night sky. In fact, the background is blank white but the hue of her skin is enough to tell us all we need to know. (https://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2016/02/moonlight-magic.html )
ReplyDeleteHe was quite an extaordinary talent and, as MORAN says, he doesn't get the recognition he deserves, perhaps because he changed styles later in his career.