With Wisdom Coiled Inside

At 73, unbuffeted by the latest fuss or fashion, Painter James Chapin lives quietly on his New Jersey farm doing exactly as he wants. "As usual," he will say when asked. "I am painting people." His people may be famous or obscure, and may end up anywhere from the wall of a museum to the cover of TIME, but his work sets him apart as one of the finest veteran portraitists going. One of his best portraits made news last week when Amherst College announced that it had bought for its permanent collection his 1929 painting of Poet Robert Frost.

The two men had met twelve years before, and they took to each other--and to each other's work--at once. Frost, who was still poor and comparatively unknown, was delighted to have Chapin illustrate his volume of poems North of Boston. By 1929, fame had come to both men, and Frost was the pride of the Amherst faculty. That year Chapin went up to the college town to begin his portrait.

He took over a year to finish it: long before brush was put to canvas, he did sketch after sketch of Frost's hands, his head, his posture. "I can't explain it very well," Chapin once said, "but it is the symbolic human gesture that interests me --not the gesture of hands and feet but the carriage of the human body and the human head." Here, the carriage is erect, proud, quietly intense, with wisdom coiled inside like a spring.

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