Art: Artist Lintott

Commissioned by TIME to paint the King & Queen of Great Britain in Parliament robes (see front cover) Artist Edward Barnard Lintott of London, Paris and Manhattan* was at home last week in his pale green, high ceilinged 57th Street, Manhattan, studio. Now 54, Artist Lintott looks ten years younger, is large and broad, immensely genial, bears a marked resemblance to London’s favorite music-hall comedian, bushy-browed George Robey. As a painter he lived ten years in Paris, studied under the late great Jean-Paul Laurens and Benjamin Jean Joseph Constant, wrote a text book on watercolor painting which is quoted by Encyclopaedia Britannica as an authority, and became a fashionable portraitist. But painting is only one of the many things that Artist Lintott has done. He worked under Lord Northcliffe on the Daily Mail at its inception. He edited and illustrated a colored Women’s Supplement of the London Times. He has been Librarian of the Royal Academy. In 1915 he helped raise a regiment of painters, the United Arts Force, offshoot of the Artists’ Rifles of Kitchener’s Army.

Edward Barnard Lintott is one of the few artists who have ever been diplomats.

In 1915, because he was good at cyphers and puzzles, he was sent to St. Petersburg under Sir George Buchanan as Secretary to the Ambassador, a post created for him to avoid his taking a Foreign Office examination. It is his boast that he was the last man officially presented to the Tsar at court.

His most exciting Russian experience during the revolution was sitting up at night for three months in the Embassy with a pistol in his hand guarding $5,000,000 worth of platinum to be smuggled into Britain to make fuse points for shells.

Artist Lintott painted his first society portrait, after the War, of Lady Diana Manners, as she lay in bed. Since then he has done hundreds, expects to do many more. Privately he hates society jobs, quotes his friend the late great John Singer Sargent that “portrait painting, my boy, is a pimp’s profession.” One portrait, however, that he thoroughly enjoyed was that of faithful James Miller, ancient, honorable red-nosed steward of Princeton’s Ivy Club. Because Artist Lintott painted faithful James smiling quizzically over a silver cocktail shaker, timorous club trustees refused to accept the picture, feared that its exhibition might bring Princeton and the Ivy Club into disrepute, suggested the substitution of a coffee pot. Artist Lintott, who had never seen James or any other able steward shake coffee, refused. Last week both portrait and silver shaker were on view in his studio.

* Not to be confused with Instructor Henry John Lintott of the Edinburgh College of Art.