Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 19 Fall 2001

              THAT BIT HAS ITS
UNFADING COLOR
In 1973, the Smithsonian Institution acquired a 1950 painting of Santayana by Harry Wood
(acquisition number NPG.73.42). Mr. Robert G. Stewart of the National Portrait Gallery there
sent me, with Wood's permission, a Xerox copy of "Harry Wood's literary comments on
painting George Santayana's portrait," saying that he was "somewhat at a loss as to where such
a thing could be published." At that time, I too was at a loss as to where Harry Wood's
charming memoir of his sojourn with Santayana in February 1950 — that he evidently actually
wrote in 1972—might be published. So, after reading it and then putting it aside for more than
a quarter century, I recently fished it out of my file, reread it, and thought that it would make an
informative and entertaining feature in Overheard in Seville.
An obituary notice in the Arizona State University faculty and Staff newspaper of April 21,
1995 describes Harry Wood as the former director of the University's School of Art, the post he
had occupied since corning to Arizona State in 1954. Harry Wood was born in 1910. In 1933,
he received a master's degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin, and afterward
earned a master's degree in art and a doctorate in fine arts from Ohio State. During his long
career at Arizona State Harry Wood was known as a painter, sculptor, innovative teacher, and
farsighted administrator. A photograph of Harry Wood taken in 1970, accompanying the
obituary notice, depicts the artist looking on smiling while a young boy of perhaps fourteen or
fifteen sketches the face of Abraham Lincoln, with whom Harry Wood was fascinated. He
himself did several portraits of Lincoln in various media. In this photo, Wood wears glasses, as
he does in a fine self-portrait he painted in 1933; and his hair, though now grizzled, is as full
and thick as in the youthful self-portrait. This photo of Wood at about sixty shows him with a
white mustache, whereas he is clean shaven in the self-portrait of him at about twenty-three.
Harry Wood retired from Arizona State in the mid-1970s, and a gallery in the School of Art, for
the exhibition of graduate student artwork, was named in his honor. According to Lise Hawkos,
Curator of the Harry Wood Gallery, Wood was, as he appears in the photographs, a tall and
imposing man. But, she adds, he was very gentle, pleasant, and kindly. He was, according to
Ms. Hawkos, something of a character, with a keen interest in the occult. He was much
interested in the use of halos in paintings. Harry Wood was made professor emeritus after his
retirement, and he died on April 7, 1995 at the age of eighty-four. Shortly before his death,
Harry and his wife, Ann, lost most of their papers in a fire in their home. Fortunately, the copy
of Harry's memoir of Santayana had been sent to Mr. Stewart at the Smithsonian and its text is
available to us today.
The oil-on-canvas portrait, seen on the opposite page, is 23*4 by 28 inches, and may be viewed
today at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian.
WILLIAM G. HOLZBERGER
Now that he is dead, I am free to follow the advice George Santayana gave me
about buying books. It was February, 1950. I was painting his portrait in
his nunnery-hospital room in Rome. He asked me point-blank if I had bought
the second volume of his autobiography, Persons and Places. I confessed that I'd
read a library copy, but hadn't bought one yet.
"Well don't," he chuckled. "It will be a better bargain after I'm gone. It'll be in
one volume instead of three. And some of the things left out will be back in."
"My memories are works of art," he said, "and the older they are, the brighter
and more clear they seem. This causes me to suspect that I may have elaborated them
and perfected them artistically. So I can no longer vouch for their accuracy."