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Clinton King, early 1940s |
Lady Duff Twysden in 1920s Paris |
Narcissa and Clinton King in 1946 at the Fort Worth Club
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Artist Clinton Blair King and His Notable Wives
In early 1924, owner/developer John P. King was preparing to sell lots in his new Oakhurst development. At the same time, his middle son, Clinton Blair King, a Virginia Military Institute and Princeton graduate, was working in the family candy business. What Clinton really wanted, however, was to become an artist. Not content with the future his father had laid for him in his candy empire, Clinton was encouraged by his mother, Lorena Blair King, to study painting with artist Sallie Blyth Mummert at the Woman’s Club of Fort Worth.Clinton quickly began to make a name for himself by painting well-received portraits of heiress Electra Waggoner as well as Amon Carter’s young children, Amon, Jr. and Ruth. Clinton’s success at selling his paintings and winning prizes for them convinced his father to be open to his future as an artist. He then studied art at the Broadmoor Academy in Colorado and with Charles Hawthorne in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
With the blessing of his parents Clinton went to Europe in 1926 to continue his art studies. He met and became a good friend of Pablo Picasso. Eventually, Clinton came to know the American expatriates who defined the “lost generation” of the 1920s in Paris – Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, his wife, Zelda, and others.
And then there was the English socialite and London debutante, the twice-divorced Lady Duff Twysden, who caught Clinton’s eye. She was a member of Hemingway’s crowd who had travelled with them to Pamplona, Spain for the bullfights. Duff had abandoned England for Paris after her second divorce, losing custody of her seven-year-old son Anthony in the process. A favorite of Hemingway, he modeled his intemperate, coquettish protagonist Lady Brett Ashley on Duff in his 1926 novel, “The Sun Also Rises.”
Duff and Clinton married secretly in London in 1927 prompting his parents to cut off their financial support, perhaps because of her reputation and because she was 10 ½ years older than Clinton. The couple moved to New York where Clinton sold some paintings and went to work as an artist for the Works Progress Administration during the height of the Great Depression. Duff died of tuberculosis in Santa Fe in 1938.
During their marriage, Clinton recalled, “We lived a different life from the rather senseless Montparnasse days [in Paris]. I worked all day at painting while Duff drew her amusing sketches . . . or posed for me . . ..” At her death, Hemingway said, “Brett died in New Mexico, call her Lady Duff Twysden if you like, but I can only think of her as Brett.”
In 1936, Clinton had exhibited paintings at the Texas Centennial Exhibition at Fair Park in Dallas. After Duff died, Clinton continued to paint and study. In 1940 artist Georgia O’Keefe introduced her friend Narcissa Swift to him at a New Mexico workshop. O’Keefe had named her 1940 painting “Narcissa’s Last Orchid” for her.
Narcissa, almost nine years younger than Clinton, was a Chicago heiress who was the great-granddaughter of Gustavus Swift, the founder of Swift & Company. In the early part of the 20th Century, Amon Carter, a friend of Clinton’s father John P. King, had hosted Narcissa’s grandfather, Louis Franklin Swift, in Fort Worth, hoping to draw Swift to build a meat packing plant in the Fort Worth Stockyards.
Narcissa had spent her early 20s on Chicago’s Gold Coast and was editor of the liberal magazine “Polity” for a short time. She had become interested in politics while she worked on Fiorello LaGuardia’s New York City mayoral campaign. In 1941, she and Clinton married. He became an internationally known painter; they became a high profile, influential couple. Always a booster of Clinton and his art. In 1964, Narcissa helped found the Chicago Urban League’s woman’s board, an integrated group of about 60 women who advocated civil rights.
Clinton King was generally associated with the regional art of Texas and the Santa Fe Art Colony of New Mexico until 1940. After 1940 and into the 1960s, he exhibited often in Chicago, New York and Paris. He painted genre scenes, landscapes, portraits and still life. His early modernist portraits and genre paintings were often compared to the work of artist Diego Rivera.
Clinton’s paintings won many prizes and are part of noted public collections including the Library of Congress, the National Collection of Fine Art, the New York Public Library, the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Art, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.
What was Clinton’s relationship to Oakhurst? After the death of their parents in 1948, Clinton and his brothers, Porter King and Robert L. King, inherited all their parents’ real estate. Clinton and his brothers became stockholders in the Oakhurst Land Company. As an owner of Oakhurst and West Oakhurst lots, Clinton’s name appears on many deeds of property to buyers from the late 1940s to the 1960s.
Clinton Blair King died in 1979 at age 77 while on a trip with Narcissa to Cuernavaca. His death notice in the Chicago Tribune identified him as a “Chicago artist.” Besides Chicago, Clinton had maintained art studios in Mexico, Paris, and Lakeside, Michigan.
The young Fort Worth native who had first learned to paint in classes at the Woman’s Club of Fort Worth had been a success on the international art stage making his hometown proud as one Fort Worth Star-Telegram writer predicted in 1925 he would. Clinton and Narcissa, who survived him by 18 years, are buried in the Swift Family Mausoleum in the Lake Forest Cemetery in Lake Forest, Illinois.
And then there was the English socialite and London debutante, the twice-divorced Lady Duff Twysden, who caught Clinton’s eye. She was a member of Hemingway’s crowd who had travelled with them to Pamplona, Spain for the bullfights. Duff had abandoned England for Paris after her second divorce, losing custody of her seven-year-old son Anthony in the process. A favorite of Hemingway, he modeled his intemperate, coquettish protagonist Lady Brett Ashley on Duff in his 1926 novel, “The Sun Also Rises.”
Duff and Clinton married secretly in London in 1927 prompting his parents to cut off their financial support, perhaps because of her reputation and because she was 10 ½ years older than Clinton. The couple moved to New York where Clinton sold some paintings and went to work as an artist for the Works Progress Administration during the height of the Great Depression. Duff died of tuberculosis in Santa Fe in 1938.
During their marriage, Clinton recalled, “We lived a different life from the rather senseless Montparnasse days [in Paris]. I worked all day at painting while Duff drew her amusing sketches . . . or posed for me . . ..” At her death, Hemingway said, “Brett died in New Mexico, call her Lady Duff Twysden if you like, but I can only think of her as Brett.”
In 1936, Clinton had exhibited paintings at the Texas Centennial Exhibition at Fair Park in Dallas. After Duff died, Clinton continued to paint and study. In 1940 artist Georgia O’Keefe introduced her friend Narcissa Swift to him at a New Mexico workshop. O’Keefe had named her 1940 painting “Narcissa’s Last Orchid” for her.
Narcissa, almost nine years younger than Clinton, was a Chicago heiress who was the great-granddaughter of Gustavus Swift, the founder of Swift & Company. In the early part of the 20th Century, Amon Carter, a friend of Clinton’s father John P. King, had hosted Narcissa’s grandfather, Louis Franklin Swift, in Fort Worth, hoping to draw Swift to build a meat packing plant in the Fort Worth Stockyards.
Narcissa had spent her early 20s on Chicago’s Gold Coast and was editor of the liberal magazine “Polity” for a short time. She had become interested in politics while she worked on Fiorello LaGuardia’s New York City mayoral campaign. In 1941, she and Clinton married. He became an internationally known painter; they became a high profile, influential couple. Always a booster of Clinton and his art. In 1964, Narcissa helped found the Chicago Urban League’s woman’s board, an integrated group of about 60 women who advocated civil rights.
Clinton King was generally associated with the regional art of Texas and the Santa Fe Art Colony of New Mexico until 1940. After 1940 and into the 1960s, he exhibited often in Chicago, New York and Paris. He painted genre scenes, landscapes, portraits and still life. His early modernist portraits and genre paintings were often compared to the work of artist Diego Rivera.
Clinton’s paintings won many prizes and are part of noted public collections including the Library of Congress, the National Collection of Fine Art, the New York Public Library, the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Art, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.
What was Clinton’s relationship to Oakhurst? After the death of their parents in 1948, Clinton and his brothers, Porter King and Robert L. King, inherited all their parents’ real estate. Clinton and his brothers became stockholders in the Oakhurst Land Company. As an owner of Oakhurst and West Oakhurst lots, Clinton’s name appears on many deeds of property to buyers from the late 1940s to the 1960s.
Clinton Blair King died in 1979 at age 77 while on a trip with Narcissa to Cuernavaca. His death notice in the Chicago Tribune identified him as a “Chicago artist.” Besides Chicago, Clinton had maintained art studios in Mexico, Paris, and Lakeside, Michigan.
The young Fort Worth native who had first learned to paint in classes at the Woman’s Club of Fort Worth had been a success on the international art stage making his hometown proud as one Fort Worth Star-Telegram writer predicted in 1925 he would. Clinton and Narcissa, who survived him by 18 years, are buried in the Swift Family Mausoleum in the Lake Forest Cemetery in Lake Forest, Illinois.