Art: Heroic Vegetables

Maurice Richard Grosser learned to read Homer and hunt squirrel under the tutelage of the late William Robert ("Old Sawney") Webb, white-bearded, tobacco-chewing Confederate veteran, classicist and schoolmaster in Bell Buckle, Tenn. "Old Sawney's" star pupil, Grosser entered Harvard in 1920 with the highest-in-the-U. S. college entrance marks in mathematics and Greek. Of Art he was more innocent than the youngest dauber in a modern progressive school. In 1922, when he was a restless sophomore, a leering classmate urged him to go to an art class in South Boston, because there he might see "real naked women and it only costs...

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