For as long as I can remember, the portrait of my mother hung on the living room wall. First, it graced our apartment on the top floor of a two-family house in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Then, in fifth grade, we upscaled and moved into a one-family house. The painting went with us and again took a place of honor in the living room. Years later, after my father died, my mother moved to Florida, the painting in tow. And when my mother relocated in her late 80s to a life care facility in Boston, the painting traveled with her. Of all her possessions, the painting seemed to be the most precious..
Where did the painting come from and who painted it?
Let’s start at the beginning …
My mother, Mildred Harris (known as “Millie”), came from a religious, Jewish immigrant family that settled in the small New England town of Melrose, Massachusetts. She was the youngest of four children. The family, one of only five Jewish families in town, kept the Torah in the front hall closet and the kitchen kosher.
While my grandfather, kippah on his head, davened every morning with his tefillin, he nevertheless opened his store on the Sabbath. It was hard for him to integrate successfully into American life while maintaining the Orthodox Jewish rituals of our faith. Over the years, my grandfather owned a bicycle shop and then a hardware store in his adopted community.
My mother, the only one of the four children who wanted a college education, completed a two-year teacher’s certificate at Bridgewater State Teachers’ College. Her best friend at the college was Phoebe Summers, a young, non-Jewish woman from Cape Cod. After graduation, my mother became a first-grade teacher in Fairhaven, Massachusetts (near New Bedford), and Phoebe, an English teacher on Cape Cod.
In the summer of 1932, after their first year of teaching, Phoebe invited my mother to spend the summer with her in Provincetown or P-Town, as it was and is still called by those in the know. It was already a go-to location for artists and writers. Phoebe convinced my mother that they could enjoy the cultural ambience and wait tables at a local restaurant to earn money after the school year.
My mother, who was an independent young woman, still deferred to her father for big decisions. Her mother had died at the age of 44, and my mother was still feeling the loss. Grandpa Harris tried to fulfill his youngest child’s wishes. He agreed.
So the two young women spent the summer of 1932 as planned, working each day as waitresses in a luncheonette on the main drag in Provincetown.
Every day, a young man with round spectacles and a mustache came into the restaurant for lunch. He sat at my mother’s table. He said he was teaching at a local art school and was always very polite, my mother remembered. What set the young man apart from my mother’s other patrons, however, was that he never left her a tip. That is, until the last day of the summer session, when he came into the luncheonette with a large package under his arm. It was the painting of her in this article, capturing her at 23 years old in her favorite green cotton dress, hair pulled back, looking tentatively out at the world. The artist was John Frazier.
I’m sure my mother was flattered that someone would create a painting of her, this child of immigrants who had lost her mother and was living away from her family in a strange new town.
In the following years, with no internet, my mother had no way of finding out about her benefactor … who he was and what he had become. As for Phoebe and Provincetown, my mother returned to Provincetown only once to visit Phoebe, when both of the women were middle-aged mothers.
It was only when I inherited the painting in 2020, almost 100 years after its creation, that I was able to decipher the signature in the upper right-hand corner: “Millie, John Frazier, 1932.” Needless to say, I went directly to the internet.
So who was John Frazier and why was the painting so important to my mother?
What I discovered was that John Frazier wasn’t just painting at any art school in Provincetown; it was his art school, which he founded in 1930. Frazier, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), also studied at New York’s famous Art Students’ League. (Among the many famous artists who studied there were Georgia O’Keefe, Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Louise Nevelson and Winslow Homer, to name but a few. Not a shabby lot.)
Although Frazier was a respected artist, it is said his most important contribution was as a teacher and mentor. Frazier taught at RISD for many years, becoming its president in 1955.
Today his work hangs in the Smithsonian and at Brown University among other venues.
In addition to learning about John Frazier, I learned that Phoebe Summers, now Phoebe Rogers, had retired as an English teacher at Provincetown High School. I always knew from my mother that she was married to William Rogers, the chief of police of Provincetown.
With each new discovery, it seemed to me that the oil painting should find a home in Provincetown. I contacted the editor of The Provincetown Independent newspaper for advice. He wanted an article. So he sent a reporter to interview me in Jamaica Plain, near Boston, where I was visiting at the time, and photographed me with the painting.
The article, Portrait of a Provincetown Summer, about John Frazier, my mother and me, appeared in the June 8, 2022 edition. Following its publication, and at the suggestion of the editor, I reached out to the Art Association of Provincetown to offer them “the Millie painting” for their museum. They were thrilled.
And so, on a hot July afternoon, in the parking lot of a South Shore mall halfway between Jamaica Plain and Provincetown, I met a museum trustee for the handoff. The oil painting of my mother, painted in the summer of 1932, returned to the site of its creation. It was last exhibited in the spring of 2023 among new acquisitions of the museum.
Why was the painting important to my mother? I can only conjecture … perhaps it represented her youth, her independence, her feeling of specialness after the loss of her mother. Maybe she had a crush on John Frazier. I never asked her and I will never know, but I believe it was all of the above.
