Art: Court Painter

Fortnight ago Wendell Willkie had his portrait painted. He sat in Rushville, Ind. and Manhattan, never more than 40 minutes at a time, for a, total of two hours and a half. Last week he pronounced the job good: “an almost exact likeness.” The man who painted him, lean, dapper, longish-haired John Doctoroff, exclaimed: “Oh, God, there was nothing so hard in my life. It was like painting a moving picture.”

Artist Doctoroff, 47, is the nearest thing there is to a court painter in the U. S. His court is the Republican Party, where he made friends when 1) he won a contest for charcoal drawings of the late Calvin Coolidge, 2) the Republican Chicago Tribune got a violent crush on him. Trained at Manhattan’s Cooper Union, where he took a four-year art course in two years, Artist Doctoroff was a modest illustrator in Dallas, Tex. when his Coolidge drawing, done from photographs, won over 1,000 others, was made the official campaign picture. He also drew Vice-Presidential Candidate Dawes. Thereupon Artist Doctoroff moved to Chicago, to get in big-time portraiture. Since then, a craftsman who wears an arty-looking smock but otherwise is thoroughly conservative and businesslike, he has painted a dozen portraits a year, at an average $1,500 apiece.

In 1928 Artist Doctoroff made charcoal drawings of Candidates Hoover and Curtis. (He rates Mr. Hoover one of his dullest subjects.) Having painted such bigwigs as Chicago’s Rabbi Louis Mann, Illinois’s Governor Henry Homer, the late Banker Melvin Traylor, the late William Wrigley Jr., Railroader Daniel Willard, Artist Doctoroff tried his hand at the late Abraham Lincoln. This canvas so impressed Publisher Robert Rutherford McCormick of the Tribune that he bought it for $500, replated and reprinted his Lincoln’s Day rotogravure section to feature it. In 1936 the Tribune paid Mr. Doctoroff $500 to spend a week in Topeka, Kans. painting Candidate Alf Landon. The Tribune held first rights to the picture, but the artist retained the copyright, which enabled him to charge the Republicans $1,500 for using it as their official campaign portrait. In 1938 the Tribune paid Mr. Doctoroff $500 to paint General John Joseph Pershing (who posed in his general’s coat, and pajama pants which didn’t show in the portrait). Artist Doctoroff sold the rights to the American Legion for a fund-raising campaign.

The Wendell Willkie portrait was also commissioned by the Tribune, for the usual $500. Mr. Doctoroff will sell the rights, if the Republicans wish them, for the usual $1,500. During the brief sittings, Artist Doctoroff went all-out for Candi date Willkie, resolved to vote for him al though he has never voted at all before. Last week he even let out a Willkie slogan, which impressionable Republicans may like: “He seems to put his arms around you with his eyes.”