Waldo Peirce

Who was Waldo Peirce?

Waldo Peirce was an American painter, born in Bangor, Maine to Mellen C. Peirce and Anna Hayford Peirce.

Peirce was both a prominent painter and a well-known character. He was sometimes called "the American Renoir". A long-time friend of Ernest Hemingway, of whom he painted the cover picture for Time magazine in 1937, he was once called "the Ernest Hemingway of American painters." To which he replied, "They'll never call Ernest Hemingway the Waldo Peirce of American writers." His reputation as an artist diminished sharply after his death.

The offspring of wealthy Maine lumber barons, Peirce attended Phillips Academy, Andover [Class of 1903] and then Harvard. As he once said, he never worked a day in his life. He did, however, spend many hours every day for 50 years of his life painting thousands of pictures of his beloved families, still lifes, and landscapes. In 1938, he painted two murals for the U.S. Post Office.

In 1915. Peirce joined the American Field Service, an ambulance corps that served on the French battlefields, two years before the entry of the United States into World War I. He was later decorated with the Croix de Guerre by the French government for bravery at Verdun.