Free Nat Tate: An American Artist: 1928-1960 by William Boyd Page A

Nat had been born. The regular contradictions and elaborations of Mary Tate’s story (Nathwell senior was variously a submariner, a naval architect, a merchant seaman killed ‘in a war’, a deep sea diver) later convinced his son that he was in fact illegitimate. However, there was in all the versions a link with the sea and, with ominous symbolism, the death was always the same – drowning. The only relative Mary Tate appeared to have was an aunt in Union Beach, whom Nat recalled visiting a few times. In his darker moments he fantasised that his mother had been a dockside whore and that he was the product of a swift and carnal midnight coupling with a sailor. Hence, he argued, the consistency of the identities she bestowed on his father. Whether this man was still alive, or who he actually was, Nat would clearly never know. He decided that his mother had had, in her imagination, his father ‘drowned’ as a punishment and as a mark of her own shame. It is plausible, though perhaps a little fanciful, to find some psychological sources here for the Bridge drawings: to see the bridges – simple, clear, strong – as a way of traversing safely the dark and turbulent water below, to walk, unsmirched and untouched, over the rebarbative flotsam and jetsam on the river bed beneath.
     

     
    Nat Tate, aged nine, in the gardens of Windrose, 1937
    Whatever the identity of the mysterious Nathwell Tate senior, Mary Tager took his name, referred to herself as Mrs Nathwell Tate, and pointedly described herself to anyone who asked as a widow. She remains a shadowy figure: ‘I remember my mother was a great polisher of glasses,’ Tate once recalled to Mountstuart, ‘perhaps she once worked in a bar . . .’. In any event she was a good housekeeper and she moved with her little boy to Peconic, Long Island, where she found work with Peter and Irina Barkasian as a kitchen maid, later being promoted to cook. Nat Tate was three years old, it was 1931, Peconic was his first real home; he had no memories of any life before Peconic and he had no idea where Mary Tate had moved from.
    Peter Barkasian was a wealthy man: his father Dusan Barkasian had built up a logging and timber business into the conglomerate known as Albany Paper Mills. On his father’s death in 1927, Peter immediately, and presciently, sold Albany Paper to Du Pont Chemicals and retired (aged 36) to live comfortably on the proceeds. The 1929 crash left him unscathed and his finances intact.
    He bought a small but elegant summer house, Windrose, on the north fork of Long Island, where he and Irina lived in some style. Windrose was a curiosity: built in the 1890s, it was loosely modelled on the Petit Trianon and was designed by an architect called Fairfield Douglas who had worked for a while in the firm of Richard Morris Hunt. Barkasian had two long wings added in the same white stucco, neo-classical manner, had the garden re-landscaped and a small hill bull-dozed flat to afford a better southern view of Peconic Bay.
     

     
    Windrose, Fairfield Douglas
    More than two thousand trees and ornamental shrubs were planted. His ‘retirement’ was to be in the grandest style. The couple were childless: Irina concerned herself with local charities; Peter, cash rich in the Depression, travelled to New York once a week, where he diligently managed his portfolio of stocks and shares and established a small reputation as a connoisseur and collector – Tiffany lamps were his particular passion, but he also bought and sold pictures in a modest way and he had a fine collection of John Marin watercolours.
    The eastern reaches of Long Island in the 1930s presented a picture of bleakness and deprivation: flat potato fields and isolated village communities of clam and scallop fishers, many of which still did not have electricity. Here and there were pockets of more cosmopolitan activity. East Hampton and Amagansett, on the south shore, had been attracting artists for decades, but Peconic,