Art: Barn Painter

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The farther down Maine you go, the more rarely you see nudes in barns. But last fortnight Waldo Peirce of Bangor and Castine, Me. hung his nude Siesta in the Barn (see cut) in Manhattan's Midtown Galleries as the headpiece of a show of 16 oils. Along with several other warm, exhilarating paintings, it suggested that 59-year-old Waldo Peirce is one of the few good painters of simple happiness since Renoir.

No specialist in nudes, Artist Peirce has a finely sensuous feeling for barns. In the last decade, he has painted a dozen unexcelled canvasses of the light-shot, hay-filled interiors of sunlit barns. But Maine folk would never stand for a naked woman walking around in a cowshed. So Painter Peirce first sketched his barn, then came to Manhattan to locate an appropriate model and paint his canvas.

Last April he found her—a young cellist with very little professional modeling experience and the kind of floral flesh Renoir liked to paint. Maine must still have been on his mind, for according to the model, he would paint pants on her one day, paint them off the next. He gave his nude a musing, pastoral face and the rosy-brown, gently diffused flesh of warm-weather drowsiness. Against the barn's sober timbers, earth floor and haymow, she has the calm glow of a lamp in daylight.

Large (6 ft. 2 in., 210 lb.), bearded and extremely vigorous, Waldo Peirce has lived 14 years in Maine, 20 in Europe. Recently he moved with his third wife and their three children to a farmhouse in Pomona, N.Y., near Manhattan (reason: the gas shortage). His Pomona neighbors include Playwright Maxwell Anderson, Cinemactress Paulette Goddard. But Miss Goddard, says Peirce, turns up only very rarely "to stroke a goat."