Edwin Dickinson - The Rival Beauties

The earliest of what John Driscoll calls Dickinson's "major symbolical paintings," The Rival Beauties, 1915, resembles Ashcan School paintings such as George Bellows's Cliff Dwellers in the crowded humanity that swarms through the space. But in Dickinson's picture many particulars are not brought to completion, and curving lines break free from descriptive duties with their own rhythmic life, most notably the left contour of the white skirt in the foreground that continues upward in the trousers of a doorman standing at attention and in the radically incomplete figure standing before a piano in the left foreground. The piano, inexplicable in an exterior scene, used by a cellist to tune his instrument, seem to signify a tacit approval of Hawthorne's advice: "Real painting is like real music, the correct tones and colors next to each other; the literary and sentimental factors add nothing to its real value." The intentionality of this reference is confirmed by the fact that Hawthorne was himself a cellist. Yet already, in the picture's strange assortment of subjects, including what he intended as a dead horse, Dickinson takes Hawthorne's statement, voicing an idea that was widely accepted in this period, as permission to sabotage narrative coherence by including imagery that defies the observer to account for its presence, a practice that he continued in many of his larger studio paintings.

Driscoll noted that the artist's notation on the back of an old photograph of the painting—"Ref.: Lascado Hern and the Swedish girl friend"—referred to the writer Lafcadio Hearn and argued that it offered a clue to the picture's symbolical content. Ward discovered several entries in Dickinson's journals that identify the Swedish girl friend as Alie Mörling, a fellow art student Dickinson sometimes dined with, who admired Hearn's writings and, as his notation of 3 March 1966 indicates, sent him a note upon Burgess's death, perhaps quoting Hearn. Ward suggests that the picture's title may refer to an essay of Hearn's, "Fair Women and Dark Women," in which he contrasted "the beauty of the Druidess and of the Viking's daughter" with the dark-eyed beauty of the women of Spain, Israel and India. In Dickinson's picture the pair of fair-skinned girls in the center play off against a Latin pair, suggestive of the mixed race Portuguese women of Provincetown, another pair of women in white dresses in the distance, one a redhead and one dark-skinned, and a fourth pair, less distinct, to the left of them with bowed heads that Ward sees as Japanese.