By Maxwell Rotbart

I am a 21st century blogger who recently searched for my name on Google to see how many results show up.

A modest four websites mention me. I then entered the name Walter Tittle, a virtuoso from the first half of the 20th century who is not very well known today. (He is so little known that I was able to purchase www.waltertittle.com for six dollars and eighty-five cents, before fees.) Much to my astonishment, his name appears on 4,370 websites picked up by Google. Not bad for a man who died well before Al Gore invented the Internet.


I first stumbled upon Tittle's name after reading an article (Personalities in a Parisian Salon: More Portraits in Pencil and Pen) that he wrote in 1925 for Century Magazine. In the article, Tittle speaks of the different social graces among the "Anglos" and all other cultures (namely the French). I was fascinated by how vividly he depicts the streets of Paris.

At one point, Tittle describes the Marquis de Castellane, a guest at a Parisian party, in the following terms:

"He is still quite handsome, with his patrician cast of features and exceedingly erect carriage; his salient chest suggests military training, and his blond hair is still worn high, though time has thinned it considerably.

He was clad in light tweeds, with white boutonnikre and kerchief in evidence, the note being repeated by white spats, which he always wears. He had a bulldog in leash, smart with its curious clown-like ruff of heavy leather trimmed with monkey fur, and the frantic greetings between it and Mme. Carolus-Duran's dog, one of the same litter, stopped all conversation temporarily and threatened the physical equilibrium of guests and furniture alike."

And yet, despite Tittle's artistic and unique compositions, he is best remembered by the sketches and portraits he drew.

Tittle was born in Springfield, Ohio in 1883 at a time when Chester A. Arthur was President, and impressionist Claude Monet (1840-1926) still was decades away from painting his Water-lilies series. Tittle married Neva Smith in 1932, and they had two children, both boys.

Tittle studied under art legends Robert Henri and William Chase, and came to sketch celebrities such as Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, as well as four US Presidents (William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt).

In fact, Tittle met with FDR so many times that Tittle published a book in 1948, Roosevelt As An Artist Saw Him, containing the transcripts of his conversations with the 32nd President.

Perhaps Tittle is most famous for his portraits of British author, Joseph Conrad, and Rear Admiral Richard Byrd, the first man to reach the North Pole.

Although Tittle spent much of his life in New York and Connecticut, he moved to Pacific Grove, California in his later years, dying at a nursing home there on March 27, 1966. Despite the fact that Tittle is no longer well known in the United States, the portraits he drew of this country's leaders remain classics in the art world.