Lillian Ross’ New Yorker profile of Ernest Hemingway—“How Do You Like it Now, Gentleman?” (May 13, 1950)—contains a scene with Hemingway at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was visiting with his wife, Mary, and son, Patrick, whom he called Mouse. “I learned to write by looking at paintings in the Luxembourg Museum in Paris,” Hemingway told Ross. “I never went past high school. When you’ve got a hungry gut and the museum is free, you go to the museum.”

Ross documented Hemingway looking at 10 paintings at the Met that morning. Here they are, in the order in which she reported them, along with EH’s comments about each. 

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“Portrait of a Man”
Titian, ca. 1515
“They were old Venice boys, too.”

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“Federigo Gonzaga”
Francesco Francia, 1510 
“This is what we try to do when we write, Mousie.” (He was pointing to the background trees.) “We always have this in when we write.”

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“Self-portrait”
Anthony Van Dyck, ca. 1620-21
“In Spain we had a fighter pilot named Whitey Dahl, so Whitey came to me one time and said, ‘Mr. Hemingway, is Van Dyck a good painter?’ I said, ‘Yes, he is.’ He said, ‘Well I’m glad, because I have one in my room and I like it very much, and I’m glad he’s a good painter because I like him.’ The next day, Whitey was shot down.”

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Ross reported the next painting as “The Triumph of Christ Over Sin and Death,” by Peter Paul Rubens, but there’s no such work in the Met’s current collection. The closest is “The Glorification of the Eucharist” (top image, ca. 1630), which apparently has also been called “The Triumph of Christ over Sin and Death.” Yet there is a Rubens work called “Christ Triumphant Over Sin and Death” (second image, 1615-1622) at the Liechtenstein Museum. I’m checking into which picture EH actually saw. In any case, EH and Mouse discussed whether Rubens was actually the artist. “Yeah he did that all right,” Hemingway said. “You can tell the real deal just as a bird dog can tell. Smell them. Or from having lived with very poor but very good painters.”

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Hemingway lamented missing Bruegel’s “The Harvesters” (the room was closed): “It is a lot of people cutting grain, but he uses the grain geometrically, to make an emotion that is so strong for me that I can hardly take it.”

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“View of Toledo” (date unclear)
El Greco (1540/41-1614)
“This is the best picture in the museum for me, and Christ knows there are some lovely ones.”

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[“What the hell,” EH said shortly thereafter. “I don’t want to be an art critic. I just want to look at pictures and be happy with them and learn from them.”]

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“Captain George K.H. Coussmaker” (1782)
Sir Joshua Reynolds
“Now, this Colonel* is a son of a bitch who was willing to pay money to the best portrait painter of his day just to have himself painted. Look at the man’s arrogance and the strength in the neck of the horse and the way the man’s legs hang. He’s so arrogant he can afford to lean against a tree.”

*The magazine reported the title as “Colonel George Coussmaker” but the museum lists it with the title above. 

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“Catharine Lorillard Wolfe” (1876)
Alexandre Cabanel
“This is where I got confused as a kid, in Chicago. My favorite painters for a long time were Bunte and Ryerson, two of the biggest and wealthiest families in Chicago. I always thought the names in big letters were the painters.”

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“Rocks in the Forest” (1890s)
Paul Cezanne
“This is what we try to do in writing, this and this, and the woods, and the rocks we have to climb over. Cezanne is my painter, after the early painters. Wonder, wonder painter. Degas was another wonder painter. I’ve never seen a bad Degas. You know what he did with the bad Degases? He burned them.”

*The magazine reported the title as “Rocks—Forest of Fontainebleau” but the museum lists the painting in its current collection with the title above. 

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“Mademoiselle Lucie Delabigne,” called Valtesse de la Bigne
(pastel on canvas, 1879)
Edouard Manet
“Manet could show the bloom people have when they’re still innocent and before they’ve been disillusioned.”

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“I can make a landscape like Mr. Paul Cezanne,” Hemingway then said. “I learned how to make a landscape from Mr. Paul Cezanne by walking through the Luxembourg Museum a thousand times with an empty gut, and I am pretty sure that if Mr. Paul was around, he would like the way I make them and be happy that I learned it from him.”

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Then, a musical moment!

“In the first paragraphs of [A Farewell to Arms], I used the word ‘and’ consciously over and over the way Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach used a note in music when he was emitting counterpoint,” EH told Ross. “I can almost write like Mr. Johann sometimes—or, anyway, so he would like it. All such people are easy to deal with, because we all know you have to learn.”

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“The Meditation on the Passion” (ca. 1510)
Vittore Carpaccio
“Huh! Those painters always put the sacred scenes in the part of Italy they liked the best or where they came from or where their girls came from. They made their girls the Madonnas. This is supposed to be Palestine, and Palestine is a long way off, he figures. So he puts in a red parrot, and he puts in deer and a leopard. And then he thinks, This is the Far East and it’s far away. So he puts in the Moors, the traditional enemy of the Venetians. Then he gets hungry, so he puts in rabbits.”

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