Gregorio
Valdes,
1879-1939
Elizabeth Bishop
THE
FIRST PAINTING
I ,.w by GTegodo Vald<S wa• ;n the wU.dow of a
barber-shop on Duval Street, the main street of Key West. The shop is in
a block of cheap liquor stores, shoe-shine parlors and pool-rooms, all
under a long wooden awning shading the sidewalk. The picture leaned
against a cardboard advertisement for Eagle Whiskey, among other win·
dow decorations of red and green crepe-paper rosettes and streamers left
over from Christmas and the announcement of an operetta at the Cuban
school,-all covered with dust and fly-spots and littered with termites'
wings.
It was a view, a real ·View, of a straight road diminishing to a point
throu!!'h green fields, and a row of straight Royal Palms on either side, so
carefully painted that one could count seven trees in each row. In the
middle of the road was the tiny figure of a man on a donkey, and far away
on the right the white speck of a thatched Cuban cabin that seemed to
have the same mysterious properties of perspective as the little dog in
Rousseau's
The Cariole of M. /uniot.
The sky was blue at the top, then
white, then beautiful blush pink, the pink of a hot, mosquito-filled tropi·
cal evening. As I went back and forth in front of the barber-shop on my
way to the restaurant, this picture charmed me, and at l11st I went in and
bou~ht
it for three dollars. My landlady had been trained to do "oils" at
the Convent. -The house was filled with copies of
The Roman Girl at the
Well, Horses in a Thunderstorm,
etc.- She was disgusted and said she
would paint the same picture for me, "for fifteen cents."
The barber told me I could see more Vaides pictures in the window
of a little cigar factory on Duval Street, one of the few left in Key West.
There were six or seven pictures: an ugly
Last
Supper
in blue and yellow,
a
Goordian Angel
pushing two children along a path at the edge of a cliff,
a study of flowers,-all copies, and also copies of local postcards. I liked
one picture of a homestead in Cuba in the same green fields, with two of
the favorite Royal Palms and a banana tree, a chair on the porch, a
woman, a donkey, a big white flower, and a Pan-American airplane
iJ:l
the
blue sky. A friend bought this one, and then I decided to call on Gregorio.
He lived at 1221 Duval Street, as it said on all his pictures, but he
had a "studio" around the corner in a decayed, unrentable little house.
There was a palette nailed to one of the posts of the verandah with
G.
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