Sketch portrait

Don Bachardy is a master of the sketch portrait. This one of my hero, Aldous Huxley, probably took him no more than twenty minutes. It's hard to persuade a subject to stay still for much longer than that. It's always been a fantasy of mine to wear a bottle-green corduroy suit, carry a clipboard and pad, and do sketch portraits for money in Montmartre. Bachardy did the same, except around the salons of Los Angeles. (His book of portraits was called Stars In My Eyes.) Last year, it was reported he was still doing it, drawing movie-diva Angelina Jolie in Paris, the pictures to go into the Jolie collection at her hide-out in Namibia.
The sketch of Huxley was done in August, 1962, just fifteen months before his death, which occurred an hour or two after the assassination of JFK on November 22, 1963. To me, there's something wrong with Huxley's hand in the picture, and I don't mean just that it is pointing towards the tongue in which Huxley had suffered fatal cancer since 1960. Either his palm folded in a most unusual way, or Bachardy simply fudged a finger that went wrong. That, or he relocated the edge of the hand. That aside, Bachardy makes Huxley into little more than one line, from above the elbow through the narrow face to the carrot-top hair, which Huxley kept just a little long in the Oxbridge intellectual style. Huxley was very tall, and that's reflected here in the length of the wrist, which looks vulnerable. The eyes are a bit soppily done, glamourised even, considering that Huxley was nearly blind (originally from a nasty disease caught from horrid surroundings at exclusive and expensive Eton College) and normally wore spectacles with thick lenses.
Bachardy's entree into L.A. celebrity circles began when as a young man he moved in with Christopher Isherwood, another Cambridge U emigrant (like myself, although I got my Honours degree, he didn't). They were together for decades, and Bachardy has done numerous nudes of young men. His spare drawing style became his trade-mark, with shadow and line given equal emphasis. However, this sketch of Huxley is a bit of a "sell". I'm not sure Huxley would have approved, assuming he ever saw it properly.