James S. Jaffe Rare Books - Exhibitions - Artworks and Paintings by Elisabeth Bishop

The Alice Methfessel collection of paintings and assemblages by Elizabeth Bishop

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After graduating from Vassar College in June 1934, Bishop moved to NYC where Mary McCarthy had found an apartment for her to rent at 16 Charles Street in Greenwich Village. Bishop lived there for a year, and later described her life during this period, and her work at a correspondence school for aspiring writers, in her essay "The U.S.A. School of Writing". On July 29, 1935, Bishop sailed for Europe for an extended continental tour with her friends Louise Crane and Margaret Miller, returning to the United States in June 1936.

Bishop’s year in New York was the first in a series of intermittent but unhappy attempts to live in the city. By the fall of 1951, just before sailing for South America, she told Joe Summers: "I’ll never try to live in New York again." — Remembering Elizabeth Bishop. An Oral Biography. Edited by Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau. (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), p. 126.

The brick townhouse at 41 Charles Street no longer exists.
A portrait of Bishop’s close friend Louise Crane, the daughter of Winthrop Murray Crane, founder of the Crane Paper Company and Governor of Massachusetts, and Josephine Porter Boardman, founder of the Museum of Modern Art. Bishop and Crane met as undergraduates at Vassar College in 1930 and a year after graduating traveled through Europe together in 1935-1936. In 1938, Bishop and Crane pooled their resources and bought a nineteenth century clapboard house together at 624 White Street in Key West, but in the next few years their relationship foundered, reducing Bishop to near suicidal despair. A prominent philanthropist and patron of the arts, Crane became Marianne Moore’s executor after Moore’s death in 1972.
For three months during the winter of 1938, Bishop lived in a boarding house at 529 Whitehead Street, across the street from the Monroe County Courthouse, a two-story red brick courthouse built in 1890. In all probability this picture represents the view from the boarding house. The courthouse survives, and still appears almost unapproachably tangled up in a welter of trees, telephone poles and electrical wires.
A little wooden church on Olivia Street in Key West not far from Bishop’s home at 624 White Street, where she lived from 1938 until 1946.Throughout this period, however, as Lorrie Goldensohn points out, "until taking up residence in Brazil in 1951, Bishop rarely lighted in one place for more than seasons at a time... The fractions of years and seasons are dizzying." — Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry (N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 103. Olivia Street borders the Southern Keys Cemetery, and it may have been Olivia Street along which Bishop enjoyed walking "back & forth at night" past the graveyard.
A companion piece to "Graveyard with Fenced Graves", another Key West mortuary scene. In a notebook entry from January 1940, Bishop wrote: "We have all suddenly taken a great fancy to the road by the graveyard although I always did like it very much — I can’t get enough of walking it back & forth at night. I wouldn’t even mind living in one of the little houses there, with my front yard full of decorated graves." — Elizabeth Bishop, Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box. Edited by Alice Quinn. (N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), p. 266. Bishop’s poem "The Street by the Cemetery" ["The people on little verandahs in the moonlight / are looking at the graveyard / like passengers on ship-board."] was submitted to The New Yorker for publication in the spring of 1941, but rejected; Alice Quinn finally published it in the magazine in February 2000. The painting is reproduced on the dust jacket for The Collected Prose (1984).
The slot-machine fascinated Bishop, who wrote about it in her poem "The Soldier and the Slot Machine":

Its notions all are preconceived.
It tempts one much to tear apart
The metal frame, to investigate
The workings of its metal heart,

The grindings of its metal brain,
The bite of its decisive teeth.
Oh yes, they decorate the top
But not the underneath.

Written in the 1940s, the poem was rejected by The New Yorker at the time, and finally published in Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box (2006). Bishop mentioned her rapture at first seeing Joseph Cornell’s Medici Slot Machine while she was an undergraduate at Vassar in an interview with Elizabeth Spires in 1978.
In the spring of 1942, Bishop spent two weeks in Mérida, the capital city of Yucatán, during an extended five and a half month trip through Mexico with Marjorie Carr Stevens, Bishop’s companion for five years from 1941 until 1946. On this trip, Bishop met Pablo Neruda, who was on a diplomatic mission to Mexico and one day happened to be climbing the same pyramid at Chichén Itzá as Bishop.

Reviewing Bishop’s Complete Poems: 1927-1979 (1983), on the dust jacket for which this painting is reproduced, James Merrill wrote: "The watercolor on the jacket, a view of a Mexican town done by the poet in 1942, serves nicely as an introduction. It’s a cheerful scene, in no way traditionally "picturesque." Beyond a balustrade flanked on one side by an absurd ornamental urn (so much for Art?) and on the other by flourishing palm fronds, we see some little, run-down, brilliantly colored houses. Above these, near and far, quite upstaging the few church spires lost among them, perhaps fifty windmills crowd the horizon — so that, like the mysterious flooded dreamscape in "Sunday, 4 A.M.," it appears to be "cross- and wheel-studded / like a tick-tack-toe." The picture illustrates at once Bishop’s delight in foreign parts, her gratitude for the givens of a scene, and her typical way with systems. These tend to fade beside her faith in natural powers — here, those jaunty cockades turning in wind to draw water, compared to which the Christian temples, though neatly delineated, look a touch feeble and evanescent." — James Merrill, "The Transparent Eye" in Collected Prose (N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), p. 235.
Bishop’s largest and most finished recorded painting, a basket of pansies — the name derives from the French "pensée" — beside a pair of books, was a deeply symbolic gift from Bishop to her lover Lota de Macedo Soares, inscribed "L. de M. S. from E. B. 10-28-60." In Shakespeare, the pansy, then known as heartsease, was associated with contemplation and love, the juice from its flowers most memorably used as an aphrodisiac in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. "In her simple ink drawings and watercolor sketches, often unfinished but always enchanting, one can find the style and matter of her poetry. A richly colored image of pansies beside a pile of books on a checkered tablecloth conveys her instinctive association of word and image. Bishop’s words become visible in odd angles of vision, the play with scale, the emotional language of colors, the affection for the humble." — Bonnie Costello, Planets On Trees: Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008), p. 84.
"A comb is a harp strummed by the glance / of a little girl / born dumb." — "Objects and Apparitions." Bishop’s translation of Octavio Paz’s homage to Joseph Cornell, "Objetos y Apariciones" appeared in The New Yorker on June 24, 1974, and was one of the last poems to be included in Geography III. Like Paz, Bishop was a great admirer of Joseph Cornell, whose name is now virtually synonymous with this art form. "Cornell is superb. I first saw the Medici Slot Machine when I was in college. Oh, I loved it. To think one could have bought some of those things then... When I looked at his show in New York two years ago I nearly fainted, because one of my favorite books is a book he liked and used. It’s a little book by an English scientist who wrote for children about soap bubbles [Soap Bubbles; their colours and the forces which mould them, by Sir C. V. Boys, 1889]." — Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop. Edited by George Monteiro. (Jackson, MS.: University of Mississippi Press, 1996), pp. 120-121.
"That’s one of my little works. It’s about infant mortality in Brazil. It’s called anjinhos, which means "little angels." That’s what they call the babies and small children who die. I found the child’s sandal on a beach wading east of Rio one Christmas and I finally decided to do something with it. The pacifier was bright red rubber. They sell them in big bottles and jars in drugstores in Brazil. I decided it couldn’t be red, so I dyed it black with India ink. [The little bowls and skillets filled with rice are] just things children would be playing with. And of course rice and black beans are what Brazilians eat every day." — Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop. Edited by George Monteiro. (Jackson, MS.: University of Mississippi Press, 1996), p. 120. Helen Vendler remembered seeing "Anjinhos" on visits to Bishop’s apartment at Lewis Wharf in Boston: "There was a small shadowbox that she had made to represent a drowned girl, with stickers of winged cherubs in the sky and a shoe on the beach . . ." — Remembering Elizabeth Bishop. An Oral Biography. Edited by Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau. Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts Press, (1994), p. 322.
Bishop inscribed the painting in the upper left-hand corner with the greeting "Happy Birthday", but whose birthday she intended to celebrate is unstated, perhaps her own. "Bishop’s eye was drawn to anything on a table — an oil lamp, a candelabra, tea laid for one, a scraggly bouquet of daisies in a paint bucket. This attention to proximate objects is hardly surprising in a poet who values useless concentration, and the emphasis on domestic interiors reflects her long meditation on ‘home.’" — Bonnie Costello, Planets On Trees: Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008), p. 84. On the subject of home, Bishop said, "I’ve never felt particularly homeless, but, then, I’ve never felt particularly at home. I guess that’s a pretty good description of a poet’s sense of home." — Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop. Edited by George Monteiro. (Jackson, MS.: University of Mississippi Press, 1996), p. 102.
A solitary tea service with a spoon from Bishop’s own set of flatware bearing the initial "B", set in a field of vegetation bordered by darkness, and drawn with a child’s simple resources — crayon and pencil — the scene inevitably recalls Bishop’s tea-time poem "Sestina", originally titled "Early Sorrow", published in The New Yorker in 1956. In this poem, an episode from Bishop’s own early childhood in Nova Scotia, a lonely, unheeded child resorts to the only rudimentary artistic means available to cope with, and perhaps in some subconscious way understand, her family’s grief:

With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
And the child draws another inscrutable house.
One of Bishop’s last paintings, a picture of Devil’s Paintbrush, the name given to Orange Hawkweed by New England farmers. The wildflower is common to the Northern United States and Canada, and to North Haven, Maine where Bishop spent the last four summers of her life. Bishop and Frank Bidart first rented a house together there in 1974, and Bishop insisted upon taking him on nature walks and teaching him the wildflowers of Maine.

In "North Haven", her elegy to Robert Lowell, Bishop described their favorite island:

This month, our favorite one is full of flowers:
Buttercups, Red Clover, Purple Vetch,
Hawkweed still burning, Daisies pied, Eyebright,
the Fragrant Bedstraw’s incandescent stars,
and more, returned, to paint the meadows with delight.
We are very pleased to offer for sale the Alice Methfessel Collection of paintings by Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979), one of America’s most admired poets, on the centenary of her birth. The collection consists of thirteen artworks by Bishop – eleven paintings and two assemblages – all of which were part of Bishop’s estate at the time of her death.

Alice Methfessel was Bishop’s partner from the time they met at Harvard in 1970. She became Bishop’s heir and literary executor. A descendant of John Roebling, the architect of the Brooklyn Bridge, Methfessel was born in New York City on March 19, 1943 and died in Carmel, California on June 28, 2009. Bishop dedicated her last book, Geography III (1976), to Methfessel who was the inspiration for many of the poems.

Methfessel, who found these paintings among Bishop’s papers after her death, believed them to be Bishop’s best, and there can be no doubt that they are among her finest works, each one distinguished by a unique and incandescent artistry. Dating from 1934 to 1978, the paintings constitute an illuminating map of Bishop’s adult life. The collection includes one of Bishop’s earliest paintings, “41 Charles Street” (1934). It also includes “Mérida from the Roof” (1942) and “Tombstones for Sale”, which were used as the dust jacket illustrations for Bishop’s Complete Poems 1927-1979 (1983) and The Collected Prose (1984), respectively; “Sleeping Figure”, a portrait of her lifelong friend Louise Crane; and Bishop’s largest and most finished painting, “Pansies”, which she had given to her lover, Lota de Macedo Soares, in Brazil in 1960, and which she inherited after Lota’s death in 1968. There are two additional Key West paintings, “County Courthouse” and “Olivia”; two domestic subjects, “Table with Candelabra” and “Tea Service”; the self-referential conceptual drawing “E. Bishop’s Patented Slot-Machine”, and one of her last paintings, “Red Flowers on Black.” There are also two assemblages, “Feather Box” and “Anjinhos”, which are Bishop’s only recorded constructions.

An illustrated catalogue of the collection is available.