In Washington, D.C., in 1965, eighty-one-year-old Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt and the wife of the influential Ohio congressman Nicholas Longworth, sat for her portrait. Long after the death of her husband in 1931, her acerbic yet brilliant conversation and irreverent sense of humor made her one of the capital city's most colorful and oft-quoted social fixtures. The spirit of an exuberant young girl, whose love for a particular shade of gray-blue sparked the turn-of-the-century hit tune "Alice Blue Gown," shines quietly in Peter Hurd's portrait of the aged but sprightly Mrs. Longworth.

Peter Hurd was born in New Mexico but received his education in Pennsylvania, where he later apprenticed himself to artist-illustrator N. C. Wyeth. A few years after marrying Wyeth's daughter Henriette in 1929, he returned to New Mexico, to a life of ranching and painting. Hurd was associated with the revival and refinement of the traditional Renaissance medium of egg tempera. As Hurd wrote about his delight with this technique, "I have been able to get a colour quality and flatness hitherto unknown to me . . . remarkable brilliance and complete flatness with absolutely no shine in any light!"

Peter Hurd (1904-1984)
Tempera on Masonite, 1965
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Gift of Joanna Sturm
NPG.81.115

Enlarged image

NPG Home Page | NPG Current Exhibitions
© 2002 Smithsonian Institution