Visiting Gertrude Stein

by chuckofish

I was talking to daughter #1 yesterday about Gertrude Stein. She had gone to the exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery and was thinking about visiting the Met in New York where they have an exhibit on Stein as well.

Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein

It got me thinking about the expatriot writer and her salon in Paris. People started coming to her house at the turn of the 20th century, visiting in order to check out her Matisse paintings and the Cézannes: “Matisse brought people, everybody brought somebody,” she wrote, “and they came at any time and it began to be a nuisance, and it was in this way that Saturday evenings began.”

During the 1920s many great writers, including Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Thornton Wilder, and Sherwood Anderson were welcomed into her home. Among those American writers was my grandfather, who, according to my father, went to visit one Saturday with his wife and baby son. In fact, the infant Newell actually sat on Gertrude’s lap! Apparently she thought he was a very cute baby…and why wouldn’t she:

He was pretty adorable, wasn’t he?

A bit of trivia: Gertrude Stein was the godmother of Ernest Hemingway’s son Jack.

He was pretty cute too.