Portrait of a Lady

The woman’s soulful expression and dark eyes intrigued me; something about her face spoke to me.

I told my friend, James Wilson, who had found the portrait at a New Orleans estate sale, “If you decide to sell this, I’ll buy it.”

A few months later, Wilson brought me the image. Drawn in charcoal and white chalk on gray paper, and signed “Charles Richards/1936,” it was in a battered metal frame, probably its original.

Taped to the back was an age-browned piece of paper on which somebody had printed, “Mary Rose Bradford/Wife of Roark Bradford/New Orleans author/Old Man Adam/Green Pastures/By Charles Richards/For newspaper cut.”

I recognized the name Roark Bradford; in fact, I own a first edition of his book Ol’ Man Adam an’ His Chillun. About his wife Mary Rose, though, I knew nothing.

Triage revealed that Mary Rose needed immediate first aid. The bottom of the piece was partially discolored, probably from water damage. I knew that the portrait needed to be removed from its frame and backing board, which was no doubt highly acidic and damaged by heat, humidity, and time.

New Orleans paper conservator Beth Antoine of New Orleans Book & Paper Lab was highly recommended by portrait collector Jeremy Simien, among others. My husband and I drove over to her uptown studio and delivered Mary Rose to her.

Antoine removed the portrait from its frame and discovered that it was glued to an acidic paper-based backing board. She explained that acidic materials touching the paper cause damage over time, weakening, darkening, or yellowing the paper.

After dry cleaning the portrait with a soft brush and soot sponge, she removed the backing board and its adhesive residue by applying a methyl cellulose gel to the back, which allowed her to scrape the board off slowly in layers.

She then washed the piece on a damp blotter with filtered water, to which she added calcium to adjust the pH and reduce the acidity of the paper. This significantly reduced the staining.

While waiting for Beth to work her magic, I started researching the artist, Charles Whitfield Richards.

A Google search turned up a blog by James Michael Warner, who knew Richards and had recorded interviews with him in the 1980s. Warner, who is writing a biography of the artist, told me he owns “a couple of hundred” works by Richards.

Richards was born in Rome, Mississippi on June 10, 1906. In 1921, at fifteen, he went to work as a copy boy for the Memphis Press, launching his newspaper career. In 1924 he dropped out of high school to join the circus as a “hired hand, pitching tents, cleaning up after elephants.”

Later that year, he enrolled in the Kansas City Art Institute, where he studied for one academic year, leaving in 1925 to sign on as a merchant seaman.

His marine career was short lived. He jumped ship in Le Havre, made his way to Paris, and enrolled at the Académie Delécluse, where he studied art for five or six months. In 1926 he returned to Memphis to finish high school. Twenty years old, he took night classes to earn his diploma while reporting for Memphis newspapers.

In 1927 he moved to New Orleans and took a job at the New Orleans Item. With the Crescent City as his base, he reported over the next two decades for newspapers in Houston, Memphis, New York, Fort Worth, Kansas City, Galveston, Jacksonville, and San Antonio.  

As was common then, he illustrated his own stories with drawings and portraits. Given the notation on the back of my portrait, I wondered if Richards had made the drawing of Mrs. Bradford to accompany a newspaper article.

I learned that in 1931–32, Richards worked for the American Game Association in Washington, D.C., writing press releases for the wildlife-protection organization founded by Teddy Roosevelt and others. In 1933 he worked for the National Broadcasting Co. in New York City, making sketches of TV personalities for ads.

Interspersed with those jobs, Richards bounced from newspaper to newspaper. He returned to New Orleans in 1943 and was given a one-man show at the Delgado Museum that same year. He continued to do newspaper work until 1945, when he gave it up because of his anxiety attacks. He turned to fine art full time, producing diverse works of landscapes, still lifes, and portraits.

“Charles experienced anxiety attacks throughout his life,” said Warner. “I think that might be one reason he moved around so much. He’d get nervous about being in one place too long.”

In 1991, Richards moved to Biloxi, Mississippi, where he died on July 3, 1992. That October, he was memorialized in a retrospective exhibit of etchings and oil paintings at the Artists’ Showroom gallery on Dumaine Street in New Orleans. 

I was eager to learn about Richards’ portraits, and to know if he did many charcoal portraits like that of Mary Rose.

“Charles studiously avoided specializing in portraits,” said Warner. “He felt that landscapes and figure painting were a higher form of art. That said, portraits paid the bills. Even today he is well known for his portraits.

“From the late 1920s through the late 1930s he mostly made portraits to accompany his newspaper stories. But he also made a variety of portraits in oil on canvas; and pastel, charcoal, and conte crayon on paper.

“He sold paintings on the fence at Jackson Square off-and-on for many years. Many of them were done as the subject sat. He could do a quick oil portrait in one or two hours or a pastel portrait in thirty minutes.”  

According to Warner, Richards painted many well-known figures, including doctors at the Tulane Medical School and Owen Brennan, founder of Brennan’s Restaurant. 

He also did many self-portraits. “He was the only model who was always available,” said Warner.

My research on Richards led me to a collection of his work online, especially his copperplate etchings. Turned out, I already owned a piece by him, an etching of a French Quarter building I found at the Attic Trash and Treasure Sale twenty years ago. It depicts the Green Shutter Tea Room and Book Shop at 633 Royal Street, headquarters of the Arts and Crafts Club, of which Richards was a member.

I asked Warner where he thought Richards might have lived in 1936 when he did the portrait of Mary Rose Bradford, who lived with her husband at 719 Toulouse Street in the French Quarter.

“In 1935, he lived at 612 Bourbon Street,” said Warner. “Today, that’s the Court of Two Sisters poboy shop. It’s almost impossible to track his addresses. Throughout the Great Depression, he was nomadic, particularly from 1935 to 1937. But he was not a hobo. When he moved, it was because he had a journalism job offer at the other end.” 

The Bradfords and Richards were members of the same circle of writers and artists who lived and worked in the French Quarter. They included artists Morris Henry Hobbs, Enrique Alferez, Eugene Loving, and Noel Rockmore. Richards was also friends with writer Jeanne deLavigne and did etchings to illustrate her 1946 book Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans.

I wondered how Richards had come to make a portrait of Mary Rose Bradford. One possibility was that they connected through the Times Picayune, where Richards worked off and on for years. Mary Rose’s husband Roark was the night editor and later the Sunday editor of the paper.

“Roark left the paper in 1926 to devote himself to writing books,” said Warner. “Charles came to the Item in 1927. But the reporter community was small, so of course they knew each other. Charles talked about Roark when I interviewed him. They were very close friends.”

Roark Bradford was also a popular fiction writer, best known for his sketches of African Americans, which would today be recognized as stereotypical and patronizing.  One of the most famous was Ol’ Man Adam an’ His Chillun (1928), which was adapted by playwright Marc Connelly into a 1930 hit, The Green Pastures. The play ran for 640 performances on Broadway, won a Pulitzer Prize, went on national tour, had a 1935 revival, and was made into a movie the following year. 

How Mary Rose entered Bradford’s life is a mystery. In searching for the story of the lady in the portrait, I learned that she was born Mary Rose Sciarra in Indianapolis in 1898. She graduated from Shields High School in Seymour, Indiana, in 1915, and she married a man named John Himler in 1917.

Roark Bradford, too, had been married before. In July 1933, he divorced his wife Lydia, and the next day he married Mary Rose, the mother of his one-year-old son, Richard.

Roark churned out eight books, and in 1946 began teaching creative writing at Tulane University. Mary Rose’s activities are harder to trace.

A 1937 story in the Picayune praises her appearance in her husband’s play Lousy with Charm, “a lusty tale of the Quarter”: “Surprise of the play was Mary Rose Bradford, who . . . put over her part as a Nebraska tourist who had never been kissed with a splendid stroke of pantomime.”

In 1938, Mary Rose wrote an article about a doctor who treated tuberculosis and pitched it to the Reader’s Digest. She reportedly worked as the night city editor for the Times-Picayune.

The Bradfords reportedly kept “newspaperman’s hours,” rising at noon and working (and playing) until the wee hours of the morning. Mary Rose was known as a welcoming hostess and cook.

“In the early 20th Century, 719 Toulouse was the home of Roark and Mary Rose Bradford,” reads the website of the Longway Tavern in New Orleans, which now occupies the building where the Bradfords lived in the 1930s and ‘40s.

“As both were writers who napped throughout the day and wrote at night, their home was an all night, every night open house. When winding up a night on the town, friends would ring the bell of 719 Toulouse where Mary Rose appeared with grits, bacon, eggs, and coffee for any or all. She was never ungracious toward those who took the long way home. Mary Rose found them to be kindred spirits.”

Roark Bradford died in November 1948 of amoebic dysentery contracted in French West Africa during World War II. As reported in the Picayune, he and his wife had “stayed up all night as was their custom since his early newspaper days. They visited with friends until almost 4 am.”

“In good weather they would be in the patio, in bad in the homey, gray cottage that needed paint,” read the article about Roark’s passing. “He just wanted his friends around, and they all knew their way into the patio by the side entrance.”

Although she would outlive her husband by more than twenty years, Mary Rose apparently left a meager legacy as a writer, with only one publication credit that I could find— her “Story of Annie Christmas"—which was published in A Treasury of Mississippi River Folklore in 1955.

Her son Richard also became a writer, best known for his novel Red Sky at Morning. According to his obituary, the family bought a summer home in Santa Fe when he was twelve. He fell in love with New Mexico and moved there as soon as he was able.

By 1956, and probably earlier, Mary Rose was also living in New Mexico. Her name appears in the fine-print results of a New Orleans bridge tournament as “Mary Rose Bradford, Santa Fe.” She died in Los Angeles in 1969 at age seventy.

As I continue to seek information about the elusive Mary Rose, I draw inspiration from her portrait. Now beautifully matted and framed, it hangs in my bedroom, where I gaze at it over morning coffee. Who was she, I wonder, and why was Richards inspired to capture her likeness so?

At least I now know much more about the artist. Collector John Ed Bradley, who owns several works by Richards, laments the fact that he is underappreciated. “But his day is coming,” Bradley told me. “Charles Richards was so prolific. A lot of his work is magnificent. He is going to be recognized and discovered.”

Read more about James Michael Warner's research on the artist Charles Whitfield Richard, plus other historical and cultural content, at culturedoak.com.

Learn more about the history of Mary Rose's home at 719 Toulouse—now the Longway Tavern—at longwaytavern.com.