Known for his irreverence and dark sense of humor, Boston painter Ralph Hamilton based his figurative paintings largely on newspaper photographs, often of catastrophes—burning buildings, crashing vehicles, hurricanes, murder victims, executions—and sports subjects. Creating a detailed drawing from the photograph, Hamilton then transferred the sketch to canvas and eliminated certain details to create a mysterious image that produced an effect one critic has described as "seeing only the edges of things or seeing through glare." Hamilton applied the same use of photography and process of elimination to portraiture.

In 1985, art critic David Bonetti, wrote in the Boston Phoenix:

At the end of each century Boston has had a portrait painter of great interpretive gifts — Copley in the 18th, Sargent in the 19th, and now, I’d argue, Hamilton in the 20th. . . . The subjects of Copley and Sargent were the aristocracy of their times — merchants and their wives. Hamilton’s subjects are fellow artists and intellectuals, a reflection of the change in values our society has undergone. Like his predecessors, though, he is creating one of those invaluable records that tell what a historical period was about.

Simultaneously realistic and abstract, Hamilton’s unconventional portraits are based on his selection of one of the 20 or 30 snapshots that he took of his subject’s face while standing only inches away. After choosing one of the photographs, he mapped out the image on canvas, paper, or masonite and then “fill[ed] in the blanks like paint by numbers.” While the paint was still wet, he used a dry brush to sweep it away while turning the painting on its side and upside-down until a three-dimensional image emerged. According to the artist, the painting was finished when the faces looked as if they were speaking to him. These unflinching, albeit blurred, “close-ups” require close inspection, only revealing themselves over time. What appears to be an abstract composition mysteriously and miraculously comes to life the longer one looks.

During his lifetime, Hamilton made over 200 of these intense close-ups of personal friends and international celebrities: movie and media stars, artists, poets, musicians, dancers, and critics. This painting is a portrait of Judy Goldman, an art dealer, close friend of Hamilton’s, and fittingly, longtime supporter of the Addison. Simultaneously photographic and painterly, distant and intimate, this image captures the essence of the sitter by digging beneath the surface to reveal the truth that lies beneath.

Allison Kemmerer
Mead Curator of Photography and Curator of Art after 1950