Mystery Man’s double has show on TV
How soon we forget.
Who is the Mystery Man in the painting that hangs in the Museum of North Texas? If he’s not someone of stature, he’s quite the imposing imposter.
Maybe by now someone has identified him. Allow me to continue in ignorance so I’ll have something to say.
When I looked at the picture that ran May 10 in the Times Record News, the subject of the portrait looked familiar to me. But why?
Then it hit me.
PAUSE TO GUESS.
Dr. Phil! The resemblance is striking. Maybe you saw the picture and thought so too. If not, look for yourself.
What’s more, McGraw once lived and worked in Wichita Falls, did he not?
So could Mystery Man be Phil McGraw’s grandfather?
Not likely. McGraw’s father’s name is on the Knox County Veterans Memorial in Benjamin, Texas. Maybe some or all of the family moved from Wichita Falls to Knox County by the 1940s, but that’s a long shot. So was Rich Strike.
Feel free to research that possibility yourself. Meanwhile, I’m going off in another direction.
Mystery Man is wearing Le Corbusier-style eyeglasses. They were extremely popular in the 1920s, weren’t they? It’s my guess the painting, by the gifted Emil Hermann, is from the 1920s.
My second guess? The1930s. But if you could afford to have your portrait painted during the Depression, you couldn’t have lost your proverbial shirt in the crash of 1929. You’d need holdover wealth.
That said, Hermann probably lowered his portraiture prices in the 1930s. Someone with a stable government job – like maybe a judgeship – suddenly might have been quite able to pay for a portrait.
What’s more, Hermann might have been beating the bushes, looking for commissions. A person of lesser importance but of sufficient means could have gotten his picture painted at a bargain price not long after the paint had dried on the portraits of bigger wigs executed in the extravagant 1920s.
Just guessing.
Back to those eyeglasses. Online information is vague about the peak of the popularity of the round rims. It doesn’t help that the distinctive style popularized by Le Corbusier (1887-1965) was somewhat prolonged by another two prominent architects – Philip Johnson (1906-2005) and I. M. Pei (1917-2019).
Per my own memory of eyeglasses styles, the Le Corbusier look had given way to the Colonel Sanders style by mid-century, except for some round-rimmed holdovers you could buy at the dime store.
Ignoring dime store connotations, Johnson and Pei must have wanted to identify themselves as followers of Le Corbusier rather than bend to fashion’s dictates.
The prevalence of the Le Corbusier style first struck me when I saw a 1927 group photograph displayed in the Gaylord-Pickens Museum in Oklahoma City.
The occasion was the dedication of the Mid-Continent Life Insurance building. More impressive than the building is the wealth of Minion-esque Le Corbusier eyeglasses.
My final guess:
They guy is an attorney. Dr. Phil is his great-nephew.
Photoshop Le Corbusiers onto a portrait of McGraw, and you’ll agree.
Hanaba Munn Welch is a correspondent for the Times Record News who divides her time between Abilene and a farm north of Vernon. Her columns, as a tribute to the Childress Engine 501, always contain, amazingly, 501 words.