AAH JR

The portrait of Arthur A. Houghton Jr. (1906–1990) was painted in 2009. Since Houghton had been deceased for some time, Buechner used a number of black and white photographs to capture his likeness. Former CMoG director David Whitehouse posed with the book and the glass objects, functioning as Houghton’s surrogate body (since no photograph actually depicted Houghton in this pose). Buechner encountered great difficulty with Houghton’s face, painting over and re-drawing it in charcoal several times before the final version was achieved, because no one photograph depicted the particular angle of Houghton’s face that Buechner wanted to portray. When compared to Buechner’s numerous other portraits done from life, one can see how ashen this portrait looks. The black and white source material may account for some of this, though the repainting (with thin washes of white) and charcoal revisions probably account for most of it. The objects in the picture were carefully chosen by Buechner to represent the interests and contributions of Houghton. The three glass objects (two armorial goblets, 50.2.8 A-B, and an engraved European goblet, 50.2.1) were all purchased during Buechner’s first year as the founding director of CMoG from Steuben Glass (directed at that time by Houghton). Buechner called Houghton, “a real bibliophile,” which accounts for the books in the picture as well as the portrait’s installation in the Museum’s Rakow Research Library. The book he is holding is the earliest English translation of Antonio Neri’s L’Arte Vetraria; of even greater interest is the fact that this copy was a gift from the translator, Christopher Merrett, to King Charles II, and it has the insignia of the royal library. --Stefan Zoller, studio assistant to Thomas Buechner, 2008-2010.