Longhi on Broadway

In 1926 Eugene O'Neill put his actors in masks. In his play The Great God Brown the characters hide behind them, take them off and trade them, and he used masks again in Lazarus Laughed. Charles Demuth had known O'Neill since Provincetown, the fishing town on Cape Cod where the playwright's first play reached the stage in 1916.

Scholars read this picture as Demuth's portrait of him, although O'Neill himself is nowhere in it. A leafy branch stands in a bottle, a red mask hangs from its neck and a second mask leans beside it. Below lie magazines and pamphlets, one of them marked November 1927. The title points to Pietro Longhi, the 18th-century painter of masked Venetian aristocrats, and masks have long been the emblem of the theatre.

Demuth kept the picture until he died in 1935. His will left his oil paintings to his friend the painter Georgia O'Keeffe, and she gave this one to the collector William H. Lane, whose foundation gave it to the museum in 1990.