Edwin D. Hewitt, Class of 1930,

1939

In a career extending more than seventy years, Cadmus produced remarkably consistent imagery whose melding of painstaking verisimilitude with a certain uncanny quality was a hallmark of the twentieth-century style of Magic Realism. Influenced by the precise draftsmanship of early Italian Renaissance painters like Mantegna, Cadmus adopted their meticulous and time-consuming medium of egg tempera— sometimes, as here, mixed with oil-based pigments—and completed on average only two paintings a year. The subject of this portrait, Edwin Hewitt, Princeton Class of 1930, was a friend of the artist; his eponymous gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side displayed the work of the Magic Realists throughout the 1950s.