Both: A Portrait in Two Parts

by Douglas Crase

Bothis the enchanting account of a remarkable fifty-year relationship: Dwight Ripley, the child heir to an American railroad fortune, and Rupert Barneby, the product of a wealthy, baronial English... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375422668
• ISBN13: 9780375422669
• Release Date: April 2004
• Publisher: Pantheon
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 1.1" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

A perfect match

I first heard of Dwight Ripley about 20 years ago from a friend, the poet Harold Norse, who was then writing his memoirs. Norse reported that he, Ripley, to get a date with him, Harold, who was playing hard to get, and Ripley finally asked, well, what would it take to get you to go out with me? And thinking on his feet Harold said shyly, I guess a Picasso. And a day or so later a messenger brought a Picasso to his tenement door. (This story was much better told, by Norse himself, in his autobiography MEMOIRS OF A BASTARD ANGEL.) I can't imagine a biographer better suited to tell the life of Dwight Ripley (and the conjoined life of his partner, the botanist Rupert Barneby) than Douglas Crase, for whom this project is so evidently a labor of love. The two men were fabulously wealthy, and have long ago passed into legend, legend of the Augaean sort from which it would take Hercules to extricate them. Crase makes a good case for his thesis that Ripley's drawings with colored pencil are worthy of further study. Of course he hardly helped his credibility as an artist by bankrolling the gallery (Tibor de Nagy) which showed his work. And everyone knew it, or so it seems. No wonder people thought of him primarily as an eccemrtic Daddy Warbucks with a blushing problem. Meanwhile Rupert was discovering new specimens of plants and designing dramatic garden vistas. Crase tries to pry back the curtains of myth and show us the sometimes troubled, more often perfect relationship between the two men, and to argue that they were quite accomplished. "Yes, but" is this reader's response. Sure, they did good work, but with that kind of bankroll, they might have conquered cancer! I suppose this isn't a very fair response to BOTH, and it's one that Crase answers sensibly but noting that, while Fitzgerald told us that the rich are different than you and I, the truth is that WE are different when we're around the rich. Anyone who loves plants, art, mad queens, money or Marie Menken and Willard Maas will enjoy this book immensely. I know I did.

humanity of a citizen of earth

This is a portraint in four parts: a story of humanity of a given period, written by a gifted writer. Beyond details, one is led to see finites of life and at the same time its unlimited potentials and joy.