Renowned American portrait artist Albert K. Murray—viewed by many as being in the same league as John Singer Sargent—reflected on his art in an oral history published by the U.S. Naval Institute in 1994. He was commissioned as a lieutenant early in World War II and served on active duty as a combat artist and portraitist before returning to his New York studio in the late 1940s.
As a two-striper in the landings in southern France, Murray moved up into the mountains with a fire control officer from one of the destroyers and broke out his watercolors on a terrace behind a parapet, with German shells exploding near and far. An Army voice shouted out, “‘For God’s sake, Captain, don’t you realize you’re a target out there.’ . . . Then the next round came; that was five. My dog tags were hanging down from my neck on a chain, and one of the pieces of shrapnel cut a dog tag off. I still have one, but shrapnel got the other,” Murray recalled.
When the war ended, he was assigned to paint the official portraits of many soon-to-be-legendary admirals, generals, and civilian leaders who fought and guided the war at sea. Some of the finest of those paintings are presented here, with his words on the approach he took with each subject.
Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz
“I wanted that scene of the surrender, which would be the climax of his long and exciting career. I wanted it to be dominated by him, and I could do that by placing him the way I did. I reassembled a composition that would include the entire Allied contingent behind Admiral Nimitz who had just signed the document for the United States and was rising from his chair—the Japanese contingent with [Foreign Minister Mamoru] Shigemitsu and the rest of them over on the other side of the ship.”
Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal
“He was a little bit like Atlas; he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. There was the kind of feeling ‘the world is coming apart and what can we do to hold it together. It is almost beyond us but we must do it and we must try.’ It is a kind of concentration. You can almost feel the wheels go round, of the mind, of a person who is deeply absorbed in something. His wife hated the portrait; she thought that I had shown that he paid too big a price for that job, and I thought that was part of my role.”
Commander Albert K. Murray, USNR
“I married a paint brush; my whole life is wrapped up in this darn thing, trying to paint portraits and trying to make them as good as I can. If it is a still life, it is going to be there day after day, but when you are dealing with human expression, it may be there once in days and not very long. So you are the hunter in a duck blind with both barrels loaded, ready to fire as soon as the target has done something that you can’t miss. You are looking for all these things without the subject being aware of it.”
General Alexander A. Vandegrift
“I thought he would like to have [his portrait] in a combat nature, because he’d been right in the thick of everything at Guadalcanal and had earned the congressional medal, but he wanted it in an administrative capacity. As I painted, I was having trouble; he had a facetious look, not sober; there was a quarter inch in the vertical of the face I could not account for. ‘I’ll tell you what’s happened,’ he said with a twinkle in his eye. ‘I’ve been having dental problems, and the dentist has just given me an upper and lower denture.’”
Vice Admiral Marc A. Mitscher
“A fellow like this carrier force commander, Admiral Mitscher, would have a dozen battle plans in the drawer of his desk there, and he would figure out if our first contacts indicate the enemy is such and such, this will be our procedure, and for so and so, we’ll try that. So he had done everything he could think of to meet the situation. He would back and fill and feint and be a terrific adversary. I think Mitscher was an extremely uncanny and shrewd kind of fellow.”
Captain Arleigh A. Burke
“I was envisioning an under attack, general quarters scene at night aboard his lead destroyer, a salty affair with this if I could, because he was such a marvelous destroyer commander, in oil skins, breaking out of the sack in those little quarters that the commander would have up on the bridge, trying to get what cat naps and rest he could. The illumination by flares, an amber kind of light from aerial flares—life aboard that kind of destroyer in those days of heavy duty for everyone right around the clock.”
