Naked Ladies in Chairs

You've been a wonderful audience! I'll be here all week!

(Randall Davey home, Santa Fe, painting by Karen Foss)

Santa Fe is an enchanted city. Trust me. We lived there for eight years and I know magic when I see it.

Canyon Road, home to countless art galleries, is the beating heart of the city. You can feel the creative alchemy of about a million artists going back for more than a century, just by walking up that hill.

If you just keep on going you will come to Upper Canyon Road, which is residential and has a completely different vibe. In a couple more miles, Upper Canyon dead ends at an otherworldly place if ever there was one: The Randall Davey Audubon Center.

There are marshes, a river and natural habitats for all kinds of birds. On Saturdays they have free birdwatching walks. The first time we did one we saw 36 species. Even loons, who look like a duck, swim like a duck, but it turns out aren’t ducks. Who the hell knew that?

The first thing you pass on the walk is an old two-story adobe house. It’s big and pink and hard to miss. It was the home and studio of a 20^th century artist named Randall Davey, whose heirs donated the house, the studio and 134-acre grounds to the Audubon Society some years after his 1964 death in a car crash.

The Audubon people agreed to preserve it as it was in the artist’s day, offering public tours and keeping his name out there. The tours are a bargain at $5, but be sure to factor in the cost of replacing your shock absorbers after driving there down a severely rutted dirt road.

The Davey home is a remote spot in a remote city, far, far, from Earth. That’s the best way I can describe it without taking you there myself.

The first time I took that house tour I got totally hooked on the history, which reflects a richness way beyond the artist himself.

The house was built as a U.S. Army sawmill, in 1847, to produce lumber during the Mexican American War. It saw duty as both a sawmill and a gristmill, but was no longer in use when Davey bought it in 1920 and moved to Santa Fe with his wife and son.

(Me, enjoying a drink at Randall Davey’s secret speakeasy. Don’t tell anybody.)

A good docent can weave legendary frontier scout Kit Carson, Prohibition moonshine and a scalped territorial governor into the tour.

A truly great docent can fold the sinking of the Titanic and a brand of upmarket marmalade into the mix. The great ones make it look so easy.

I was spellbound. I read everything I could get my hands on about the Davey life and times, finally even buying a small original Davey pen and ink sketch for myself. I became such a pest for more information that the Audubon folks asked if I would like to be a volunteer docent.

No, thank you, I said.

(The writer and two happy tour customers in Davey’s studio)

Here’s the thing. As a docent, you create your own tour. You may focus on history, art, furnishings, whatever you want, but I saw nothing I could put my own personal imprint on. Nothing to make Bob’s tour any different from all the others.

But that changed when I recognized the potential for a new and very unlikely tour direction: humor. I told them to count me in. 

As a longtime journalist with an eye for quirks, foibles and ironies, I saw the opportunity for a series of well-told human interest stories. I saw sex, adultery, betrayal and debauchery, all woven together with a streak of dark humor.

Sure, I threw a lot of history and art into my tours, but for me it was always about reading the room, leavening the event with some laughter and leaving them wanting more. Like any good stand-up act.

I often thought that if the Audubon folks had any idea how irreverent my tour was, they would have hurled me into the wetlands to swim with the loons.

(The 1912 chain-drive Simplex roadster that carried Davey to New Mexico)

I would always begin my tours with the true story of a car trip in a roadster carrying Davey, his wife, an artist friend and the friend’s wife. The friend’s wife was an alcoholic former prostitute.

 “Six weeks on the road, from New York City to Santa Fe,” I would begin.         

”If you’ve ever travelled cross-country with an alcoholic former prostitute, you can imagine it probably seemed much longer than six weeks,” I would add with a straight face.

Wait. People would look at each other. Is this humor, in a serious tour? Is it okay to smile at this guy? Maybe there’s something wrong with him.

My reward would be the first tentative group laugh. In nice weather it came before we even walked through the front door.

(Florence Davey portrait, 1914, by George Bellows)

In the living room of the Davey home there is a photo of a portrait of Florence Davey, Randall’s wife.

The original, which hangs in the National Gallery of Art, was painted by prominent artist George Bellows. Another Bellows painting, long after his death, sold for $27,000,000 to a man named Bill Gates. Bellows is the real deal.

This is, surprisingly, the only known painting of Florence Davey. How could  this be true when the woman was married to a celebrated portrait painter? Here’s where the juice gets really juicy.

In 1930, Davey was commissioned to paint a portrait of Cyrus McCormick III, the very wealthy grandson of the man who invented the reaper.

In the course of coming to Davey’s studio along with his wife, Dorothy, to pose, an odd thing happened. Cyrus McCormick III and Florence Davey fell in love.

They divorced their spouses and married each other. Randall was so embittered by this he methodically destroyed every portrait he had ever done of Florence. Only the Bellows painting, which she had taken with her, survived.

After this serious set-up, I would solemnly pass around a photo of the finished portrait of Cyrus and Dorothy. He’s obviously an enormous twit and she obviously knows it.

(Cyrus McCormick III and his soon-to-be ex-wife, Dorothy)

Guaranteed guffaws. If I was doing it right, at this point this was no longer a formal tour. It was just me and a couple dozen friends, having some laughs.

In the Daveys’ upstairs parlor, the most prominent object is a full-length portrait of Isabel, Randall’s second wife.

She is buck naked.

There is a small pink flower beside her, and the title of the piece is “Nude With Geraniums.” That automatically elicits a cheap laugh when I say it aloud. If I repeat it, the laughs grow louder. The more I appear not to understand what’s funny, the more they laugh.

This painting was sold at auction in 1985, but when the buyer, who paid $19,800, showed it to his wife, she said no way was that thing ever hanging in her house. So, he donated it back and they put it up in the parlor again.

Everybody loves that story, and they never take their eyes off the geraniums.

(A portion of “Nude With Geraniums”)

There is a lot of nudity on the tour. Bare skin everywhere.

It always tickled me up that Davey moved to Santa Fe from the East Coast because of the landscape, color, light and all that good stuff that inspires painters, and then he went right back to painting naked chicks in chairs, which he could have done anywhere.

After I mentioned this chair thing early in my tour, people would laugh every time they came to another nude in a chair. It was the gift that kept on giving.  

We were contacted by a Southern Baptist pastor from Texas, who wanted to bring 25 members of his flock on a private tour. We warned them in advance about the nudity.

The pastor said it wouldn’t be appropriate for his people to see such a thing and he asked that we limit their tour to only rooms with no nudity.

“Sure thing, that will be a five-minute tour of the living room,” I said. They came, anyway, and I gave them the single-room show. No geraniums for the Baptists.

One Friday afternoon I arrived at the Audubon Gift Shop where the weekly tours began, and the volunteer on duty told me only one customer had shown up. I was not happy.

“What? I have to give the whole tour for one fricking person?”

“Hey, I can hear you, you know,” a woman’s voice said from the far side of a pamphlet kiosk.

Oh, good. I had offended a paying customer. The only paying customer.

Trying to redeem myself, I said, “I’m so sorry, what I meant was, I’ll give you the same quality tour as if you were 25 people.”

“And what quality is that?”

“Pretty poor, I have to say.”

“Alrighty, then! Let’s get started!”

Thank you, God, she has a sense of humor.

It was my best tour ever. We riffed off of each other’s one-liners for 75 minutes. We made up stupid stories behind the paintings and cracked up about Davey’s son being married six times, which he really was.

The woman, a visitor from Ohio, later posted on Facebook that my tour was the best one in Santa Fe. I treasured that.

(The red dress)

Not everything on my tour was for laughs. Goosebumps were in order out in the artist’s studio, where I would call attention to a privacy screen with a red velvet dress casually draped over it. Then, with a dramatic gesture, I would point across the room to a painting of Isabel, wearing that same dress.

Gasps, all around. It never failed.

(Isabel, wearing ‘the dress’)

I miss those tours, hearing the laughter and thinking on my feet. As so often happens in this life, we don’t realize we’re doing a thing for the last time until it’s too late.

I led my final tour at the end of February 2020, followed immediately by a global pandemic. By the time it lifted, we had moved to Indianapolis, a whole world away from Upper Canyon. No more geraniums for me.

I didn’t have to give up quite everything. As I mentioned earlier, I did buy my own Davey sketch, which now hangs in our new home. A woman. Naked. In a chair.

Visitors to our home often casually ask about the sketch.

The poor saps. They have absolutely no idea how long it’s going to take me to answer that question.