Richmond's Own Greenwich Village

It's Growing Every Year; Colony Toured

 By Margaret Barker Seward

 Madame Lefevre, who sold artist's tools in Paris, had an account of long standing. It stood on her books, in fact, for 32 years.

For about 30 of those years, the artist who owed her the money considered himself the pet of Fortune if he ate. The the time came when he could afford three meals a day--not on the cuff. Not long after, a vat of caviar could have been gracing his larder.

The artist had arrived.

It's too bad that it was not a triumph of art, alone, and that such a thing as the stock market had anything to do with the caviar--and Madame Lefever's paid bill. But such was the case. And Madame Lefevre got a return on her investment in the artist that must have warmed her French heart. For, in the days when the artist was running up his bill with such enthusiastic regularity, there were four or five francs to the dollar. When the artist paid up there were 30 francs to the dollar and the artist paid in American dollars.

Good Artist Always Pays

"It just goes to show," remarked a Richmond art dealer who knows his artists, "that you can always trust a good artist. But, mind you, they have to be good."

Possibly this art dealer was turning this favorite story of Madame Lefevre's over in his mind when he had the idea of starting in Richmond a colony where artists might live.

The idea sprang, clothed in all its reasonableness, from the caressing gossip of the barber as he plied the brush and razor. . . . A group of houses over on North First Street were going to be sold, the barber confided. Whoever wanted them could buy them for almost nothing--or the real estate monger's idea of nothing--for they were tumbling down almost and were fast adding themselves to Richmond's slums.

The art dealer hastened to call a Richmond woman on the phone--a woman who was interested in the arts in a real and substantial way--and told her of his findings. They bought the four houses that were for sale--he took two and she took two--and Richmond's Greenwich Village became a going concern of the late 1920's.

They welcomed artists as tenants' these investors in the "development," and tore up the houses in such a way that the whole downstairs (except the kitchen) was thrown into one room, with high ceilings and much sunlight.

All the tubercles, boils and pimples were taken off the woodwork," one of these altruistic owners told me." We ripped off the sagging front porches and put wrought iron railings--and did what we could to make congenial surroundings for Richmond artists in search of rent they could pay."

Artists Become Good 'Prospects'

Behold! the artist, far from being the pet aversion of the real estate office; the apotheosis of the poor risk; a "prospect" who didn't deserve the name, was being planned for and considered. Two real estate owners had committed the ultimate in urging on disaaster and had invited him in. "You can always trust a good artist," they told themselves.

Unfortunately a good, bona-fide depression can't be trusted and the Greenwich Village on First Street began to look slightly less colorful than the barber's pole. When the big business man's face fell with his stocks, you couldn't expect an artist to keep on whistling.

But, as a matter of fact, there were some artists who had more cause for merriment than the big business man who'd said "Nobody but a damn fool would paint anyway."

"What some people don't realize," this art dealer told me, "is that art has an international value. Persons in Richmond who had been good customers of mine lost their money. Still I wasn't "stuck" with my paintings. I sent them to Norway, some of them, for Norway hadn't had any depression and got excellent prices right along. That shows you how "impractical" art is.

Life Became Mostly Shreds and Patches

Life, undeniably, did become a thing of shreds and patches for many artists during depression years. And Richmond's art colony on First Street had some tough sledding. Both artists and real estate owners began to think that that school teacher who had unwittingly started New York's Greenwich Village had better have been giving her time and thought to the binomial theorem.

Certainly there was no need of higher mathematics among these art-investors here. But Richmond's Greenwich Village returned to the sparse fold of practical paying investments--for a time. Berkeley Williams, one of the best of Richmond's artists, once had a studio in one of the four cream brick houses on First Street. Miss Anne Fletcher, one of whose paintings hangs in Stratford, still lives there--and likes it.

But like the artists for whom it was intended, Richmond's Greenwich Village loved to roam. Now almost in the immediate neighborhood, you'll find artists--good artists-- painting for love and for money. Young artists they are, most of them, and more than the average young man and woman starting out in "business" they seem to be able to invite the wolf to go climb a tree.

Artists No Longer Queer Birds

"This notion that the artist must starve and live in a rookery along with other queer birds has been all washed up," said this art dealer who still cherishes his investment in Greenwich Village.

"The artist does not always have a business head, but he does not now habitually set himself down to a Barmecide's feast three times a days. Most of the Richmond artists I know are doing well for themselves. In fact there is more worthwhile work being done here than since before the War Between the States.

"Virginians knew what good painting was a long time ago, else we would not have so many Sully's and works of other great American painters in Virginia. After the war there was poverty and an army of portrait painters invaded the South who charged $50 or so apiece for their works. They left behind them an avalanche of bad paintings. Still there was taste for good painting here, and just recently I think that Richmond has come to have what might be called a renaissance of painting. I can name at least five or six really good painters who make Richmond their home, and there are many more whose work shows promise."

When a half dozen good artists make a town of this size their home, there must be a reason.

Perhaps one of these reasons has its origin in Greenwich Village--Richmond's Greenwich Village. In the idea that in spite of what hard-boiled business men have said about their long hair and their fancy arithmetic the artist is an asset and as such should be cherished and that the mechanism of living should be made simpler and easy for him.

Why do artists like Richmond? Here's what some of them say:

"You can think cheaper in Richmond. Maybe it doesn't do me much good to think. Anyway, when I have thinking to do I can do it more quietly and more cheaply in Richmond."

"You can find truer types here in Richmond. People here seem rooted to the soil. And when you stroll about the streets you come across types who could not have come from anywhere else but Richmond. It's like New Orleans that way. Richmond has been called beautiful. Well--that all depends upon what you call beautiful. To an artist it is beautiful because of this very thing I've been talking about: this feeling for their native soil that people here have. I don't mean the people that own some of the soil necessarily. Sometimes the beggar you meet in the street will be as much a Richmond character as the man who's a power in the business world. They all seem to have their roots deep down in the earth.

"And that is why I think some of these old corners of Richmond are beautiful--they've become a part of the ground. They've lived with the people a long time.

Across Franklin Street from the four houses that were the nucleus of "Greenwich Village" is Linden Row, and in the basement of the house numbered 110 a Richmond-born artist, Elizabeth Dance, who has exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, has her studio. It was in this house that Mary Johnston made her home.

Down Franklin Street on the next block is John Degroot; on Third Street, John Slavin.

Unlike those strange creatures that have been pictured as stalking through New York's Greenwich Village unchecked, the group of men and women who make up Richmond's artist colony have more to do with life than with a Behemian imitation of it. The range of their subjects takes in circus managers and college professors; little Negro bootblacks; characters of Richmond's waterfront; the leaders of Richmond society.

You won't find in the workshops of these artists, either, that "arty" atmosphere that clings to the "hanger-on." Believe it or not, your true artist is a human being who can talk to the news reporter in his own language and not act as if he had desecrated the fair mansions of art.

From the four small houses on North First Street, "Greenwich Village" (and by "Greenwich Village," I mean merely the lair of the artist, wherever he may live in Richmond) is getting all over the town. The atelier of Miss Nora Houston and Miss Adele Clark, those pioneers in developing Richmond's art-consciousness, that used to be something of a lonely outpost at Third and Franklin, has plenty of company now.

At the Academy of Sciences and Fines Arts an internationally known artist, Oscar Gieberich, who has his studio at 916 West Franklin, is holding art classes, and the exhibitions that are held there as well as at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and at the Valentine Museum, all tell the story that Richmond artists vouch for--Richmond is enjoying a renaissance of art.

"A good artist always pays." . . . It's true in more ways than one, for he gives us all something to think about besides war and taxes.