Edward R. Murrow interviews Tyrone Power on an episode of Person to Person originally telecast live by CBS on December 20, 1957:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“This is not the place for me to say what my own beliefs are in the matters with which religion deals, but it is only proper that I should state my conviction that no one of the faiths that men have embraced is ample enough to account for the enormous mystery. They seem to me like blind alleys cut into a primeval jungle and man deceives himself when he thinks they can lead him to its heart.”

Somerset Maugham, Don Fernando

“Perhaps no one that we know of was more tolerant than Cervantes; but tolerance is not an umbrella that you take when you think it will rain and leave at home when it looks fine; tolerance is a staff that you carry with you always in all the circumstances of life.”

Somerset Maugham, Don Fernando

Nat Cole plays Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things” on The Ed Sullivan Show. This episode was originally telecast live by CBS on April 13, 1958:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“His fertility was of course amazing and fertility is a quality to be praised in an author. It denotes physical energy, a gift a writer can as little do without as a tennis player, vitality, power of invention and variety of interest, which may from time to time create a masterpiece.”

Somerset Maugham, Don Fernando

From 2017:

In the wake of the thirty-day movie challenge comes a new meme that I find—perhaps not surprisingly—irresistible. As before, I’ve opted to do it in a single sitting, so here goes:

1. A song you like with a color in the title…

Read the whole thing here.

“There is one very good thing to be said of posterity, and this is that it turns a blind eye on the defects of greatness.”

Somerset Maugham, Don Fernando

The Teachout Museum, my collection of midcentury-modern American art and its forerunners here and in Europe, contains two prints by American impressionists who were active around the turn of the twentieth century, John H. Twachtman and Childe Hassam. The Twachtman print, an elegant little 1893 etching called Dock at Newport, was one of the very first pieces I bought all the way back in 2003. Hassam’s Storm King, an arrestingly modern-looking lithotint dating from 1918, came into my hands in 2014 after years of searching, and is now conspicuously displayed in my apartment.

As it happens, I don’t care at all for Hassam’s better-known etchings—I find them fussy—but lithography brought out a freer, more adventurous streak in his work, and there is one other print of his that I have long sought, Avenue of the Allies. Also made in 1918, it is a lithographic monochrome pendant to the well-known series of thirty-odd brightly colored “flag paintings” that Hassam made during and after World War I. They portray different parts of Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, on which the flags of all twenty-two of the allied nations were displayed as part of the Fourth Liberty Loan Drive. Taken together, these paintings are now widely thought to be his greatest works, recalling as they do the various series paintings in which Monet repeatedly returned to the same subject—haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, the Houses of Parliament—at different times of the day and under widely varying atmospheric conditions.

It goes without saying that to own one of the flag paintings would be far beyond my modest means. (To give you a notion of what they cost, Jacqueline Kennedy acquired Avenue in the Rain for the White House art collection in 1963, and it currently hangs in the Oval Office.) The lithograph, however, is masterly in its own way, full of light and air and as fresh in its feel as “Storm King,” and I have been keeping an eye out for an affordable copy ever since I first became aware of it.

The miracle, as is so often the case, came from an unexpected quarter: a flawless copy was offered for sale by a London auction house late last year. Since Hassam is all but unknown in Europe and the flag series is so specifically American in its appeal, it occurred to me that I might be able to knock down “Avenue of the Allies” with a low-ball bid, and sure enough, I got my price. It was even sold to me in a handsome frame that I saw no reason to change, and it now hangs next to “Storm King” on a wall close to my desk.

“Avenue of the Allies” is one of the first pieces of art that I have bought since Hilary’s passing and without her counsel, but I feel pretty secure in saying that she would have liked and approved of it. I wish she could see it now.

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“Childe Hassam, Artist: A Short Personal Sketch,” a silent short subject  produced in 1932 by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. It shows the artist at home and at work: