Portrait of the Industrialist as a Young Man
Charles Deering—the Maine artist you never heard of.

By Colin w. Sargent

As a dashing young naval officer and budding painter, Charles Deering (1852-1927) of South Paris, Maine, swept through Europe with some fast company–painter Anders Zorn, sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and painter John Singer Sargent.

These pals laughed together, drank together, critiqued each other’s work, and traveled together. Were they living a charmed life? Certainly they were never going to get old. During an interlude, Sargent dashed off a romantic oil painting of Deering (a Kents Hill School grad who ranked second in the Class of 1873 at the U. S. Naval Academy) a la bohème. This mysterious likeness–or at least an image of it–was reproduced as part of a major Sargent retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2015, but even the curator suggested the location of the early oil remained a mystery.

Until now. The oil of Charles in 1876 “is owned by the Deering family,” says curator Stephanie Herdrich at The Met. “During a show last year at the Art Institute of Chicago, the portrait was unearthed from deep from among the Deering family and was exhibited as part of ‘an anonymous loan.’” To be accepted in a crowd that included Zorn, Saint-Gaudens, and Sargent, “Deering obviously had a lot of talent, but there may have been tension from his family” to abandon painting and make his mark in business.

When Deering returned to the U.S., he switched careers. Business agreed with him. With a little help from J.P. Morgan, Charles shook the pillars of the aggie universe when he became the chairman of the board of International Harvester. Today, he’s in the pantheon of influential business people born in Maine–not for his painting but for his financial artistry.

Many plutocrats are changed by their wealth, but Charles never lost his boho world view. He never forgot his old friends. He sponsored shows for them, collected their work, bailed them out, encouraged them, kept in touch. He became an internationally renowned art collector and kept his collection in Maricel, a castle-like “art palace” he built near Barcelona, Spain. He hosted his buddies’ visits there and to the U.S. across many years. 

Forty-one years after they first met, Sargent visited Deering at The Deering Estate–his mansion in Miami–and painted a new, spectacular canvas of his dear friend. It, too, was among the starring paintings at the Sargent retrospective at The Met. After the show, the portrait disappeared from public view into the hands of a private collector. But the sense of friendship that vibrates in every brush stroke was so strong it startled viewers.

Charles Deering was “a cousin [to the Deerings of Portland], of course, but at sixth cousin three-times removed–not very close,” says Deering family member Nick Noyes, curator of library collections at Maine Historical Society.

Just a little more proof that as Maine goes, so goes the universe.