Who Is William Walton?

A watercolor painting depicting an indoor scene with two people sitting at a table. One person is a woman wearing a pink dress and a wide-brimmed hat, sitting on the left side. The other person is a man with glasses, sitting on the right side. On the table, there is a large potted plant with orange leaves. Behind them, there is a framed painting of a sailboat, a small round clock on the wall, and a large window looking out onto a seascape with a sandy beach.

The Death of Hemingway, c1961-65 attributed to William Walton. Casein on cotton rag paper.

Painting of a man sitting on a chair, wearing a blue shirt and blue pants, with a neutral expression and arm resting on the armrest.

William Walton, 1967 by Alice Neel.

A notable American artist of the John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy Era

Ernest and Mary Hemingway, the Kennedys, Katherine Graham and I. M. Pei were among the close friends of the artist and journalist William Walton. With President Kennedy and the first lady, in particular. However, finding the text of Frank O’Hara’s poem Who Is William Walton? has become the more important goal here today at Two Sycamores.

It’s where we’ve decided to begin telling all of the stories that swirl around this “Bill” Walton painting for us. Why on earth is it so very difficult to find the text of the O’Hara poem? It doesn’t feel like simple pesky roadblock that’s interrupting discoveries about this intruiging painting. For now, we consider it to be Walton’s reaction to his friend Ernest Hemingway’s suicide at that writer’s home in Ketchum, Idaho on July 22, 1961.

Tragedy soon followed tragedy for Walton when his friend and confidant Jack Kennedy was killed on November 22, 1963.

We acquired the “Hemingway” painting in March of 2013. Later, learning that a Lynn Magruder had owned it 41 years before only because she kindly wrote a note, in pencil, on the back of the framing “Painted by Bill Walton — given to me in 1972”.

The O’Hara poem is of keen interest because “critical sources” date the poem to 1961 (that evidence isn’t yet definitive) and, we haven’t learned of any publication of the poem before “The Collected Poems” was published in 1971. Frank O-Hara died from injuries related to a late night “accidental” death on Fire Island on July 25, 1966 while Walton was chairman of the Fine Arts Commission in Washington, DC., having been appointed by Kennedy earlier in ‘63 and then re-appointed by Johnson in ‘67.

While We Wait on Finding the Poem

To refresh all the other interesting details about the life of William Walton, we are also now reading “The Evidence of Washington” published by Harper & Row, NY in 1966 (text by Walton with photographs by Evelyn Hofer) and reading again “William “Bill” Walton a charmed life” published in 2013 by Branden Books, Boston (by Mary Hackett and edited by Mary Claire Kendall).

What attracted us to the painting?

Are the dates only a coincidence?

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