C. Gregory Stapko, 92, portrait painter, painting restorer and nation's foremost copyist of famous works of art
Hoodoo
Washington Post
March 19, 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/metro/obituaries/index.html
C. Gregory Stapko, 92, a portrait painter, painting restorer and the
nation's foremost copyist of famous works of art, died at his home in
McLean on March 12, two days before his 93rd birthday. He had cancer.
His copies of famous works, many from the National Gallery of Art, hang
in the White House, Blair House, the Arlington House, the U.S. Military
Academy at West Point, U.S. embassies, government agencies and the
Cosmos Club as well as the walls of businesses and private homes around
the world. He did original portraits of Supreme Court justices,
ambassadors and private citizens across the area.
Mr. Stapko's career as a copyist began in 1941, newly arrived in
Washington from Milwaukee, where he had been a house painter,
construction company owner and fledgling portrait painter. He
discovered that he could lug his paints and easel into the National
Gallery, set up in front of a painting on the wall and spend hours
perfecting his technique by making a copy.
As his son, Christopher Stapko, tells the story, an antiques dealer saw
a copy he had made of Pierre-Auguste Renoir's "A Girl with a Watering
Can" and assured him that he could sell it. Mr. Stapko, short on cash,
sold him the copy, which ended up in the dealer's shop window.
Not long afterward, as Stapko recounts the story his father told him,
"goons in trench coats" came to his house, bundled him into a car and
hustled him to a basement office of the National Gallery, where John
Walker III, then chief curator, and other gallery personnel waited for
him in states of high anxiety.
"Do you know what you have done to me?" an angry Walker asked. "Because
of you, I've been accused of releasing these paintings to an antiques
dealer for public sale."
Mr. Stapko's copying genius led to a new gallery rule requiring that
all copies had to be done at least two inches smaller than the original
and labeled on the back with paint that would stand out under X-rays
long after the color had faded. It also led to Mr. Stapko's years' long
association with the National Gallery of Art.
"Copying is a definite field in art, and it calls for much study and a
mastery of techniques," Mr. Stapko told the Philadelphia Evening
Bulletin in 1947, shortly after being commissioned to make a copy of
Gilbert Stuart's famous "Lansdowne" full-length portrait of George
Washington for the U.S. Embassy in London.
It usually took Mr. Stapko a week or two to make his copies. At the
height of his career, he was turning out between 50 and 70 works a
year, both copies and originals.
Casimir Gregory Stapko was born in Milwaukee to Polish immigrants. He
won a scholarship as a youngster, but he hated school, so he turned it
down and dropped out after the seventh grade. At 13, he was apprenticed
to various church painters, who taught him to restore frescoes, imitate
marble and woods, paint murals and apply gold leaf.
At 18, he started a house-painting business with 40 helpers, many of
them teenage alumni of the local reform school. He did his own painting
whenever he could find the time.
With the outbreak of World War II, most of his young helpers and
skilled craftsmen enlisted or were drafted, so Mr. Stapko, rejected by
the draft board, shut down the business. He moved to Washington at the
urging of the Polish artist Eliasz Kanarek, who had painted the murals
in the Polish pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair in New York. Kanarek
operated a studio on H Street and had prominent connections in
Washington. Those connections led to portrait commissions for his
protege, Mr. Stapko.
In addition to portrait painting and copying assignments, Mr. Stapko
restored damaged paintings, taught oil painting, did gold-leaf work for
churches, built furniture and crafted copies of old frames to go with
copied paintings. He also copied paintings for publishers of
illustrated art books.
According to another family story, Mr. Stapko was copying a painting of
Martha Washington in the White House when President Harry S. Truman
happened to walk by. "Ah, an artist! You need music," the president
exclaimed, and he sat down at the piano to play for Mr. Stapko.
In the mid-1950s, he designed and built a unique house and studio just
up the hill from the Potomac River in McLean. He also made the home's
furniture and maintained a large vegetable garden. He was particularly
proud of an artificial lake he scooped out on the property, until it
was taken for construction of the George Washington Parkway.
Mr. Stapko was, in his daughter's words, "very enthusiastic, very
passionate and very romantic. He was very, very singular in his focus.
He was an artist, and for him, that's all that you did."
Mr. Stapko always made breakfast for his six children when they were
growing up. His specialty was crepes in the shape of Mickey Mouse and
other cartoon characters.
He continued painting until about eight years ago, when he began to
lose feeling in his fingertips and his eyesight began to fail. He was
still teaching until a few days before his death.
Mr. Stapko's wife, Isabel Wetherill Stapko, a painter and textile
artist, died in 1998.
Survivors include his children, Kamila Stapko Allen of Toronto, Ohio,
John F. Stapko of Laurel, Gregory W. Stapko of Big Bear City, Calif.,
Joseph S. Stapko of Berryville, Va., Christopher C. Stapko of
Alexandria and Michael D. Stapko of Ontario, Calif.; a sister, and
eight grandchildren.