Waldo Peirce and the Hemingway Connection

Exhibition Statement

Waldo Peirce and the Hemingway Connection, was an exhibition organized by the Schneider Museum of Art. The exhibit highlighted the unique friendship between Waldo Peirce, the American Regionalist “Impressionist,” and Ernest Hemingway, a friendship that lasted until Hemingway’s death in 1961.

In Peirce’s oils and watercolors, lithographs and drawings, illustrated scrapbooks, photographs and copies of correspondence, their shared adventures were captured as they game-fished in the deep waters off the Florida Keys and ran with the bulls to the corrida during the Fiesta de San Fermin in Pamplona.

They first met in 1927 in Paris after the publication of Hemingway’s first novel, “The Sun Also Rises”. Although their paths had not crossed earlier, they had many friends in common, including John Dos Passes, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach, owner of Shakespeare & Co., a book shop that was the gathering place for struggling writers and artists.

Their friendship moved to the United States where they spent time together in Florida’s Key West. It was there the Hemingway portraits started in the late 1920s and continued to 1937, reflecting a body of Peirce’s work that began to find acclaim in the New York art world of the 1930s. Two paintings and a lithograph of Sloppy Joe’s Bar, their favorite Key West haunt, vividly portray, the atmosphere of place and time. Although the bar has since been relocated from its original site, it is still host to locals and tourists and plays an active role in the week-long Hemingway Days Festival celebrated in the city each July.

Often choosing special nicknames for his friends, Hemingway dubbed Peirce “Don Pico;” Hemingway himself was “Don Ernesto.” Each was aware they were legends in their own time, quick-witted, Peirce the more whimsical, with an eye and ear for the immediate in tone and color, a sense of place, of idiom. Prolific letter writers, fluent in French and Spanish, their lengthy correspondence was sprinkled with word play and language often as salty and vivid as their exuberant lives. Peirce died in 1970 at the age of 85.

On Loan From:

The Cambridge School, Weston, Massachusetts
Colby College Art Museum
Colby College Library
William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum
Mrs. Frederick D. Foote, Sr.
John F. Kennedy Library
Mrs. Diane Linscott
Mrs. Ellen Peirce
Michael Peirce
Henry Rollins
University of Maine Art Museum, Orono

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