I first met Peter in the late autumn of 1928 at Lee Chumley's speakeasy in the Village. I was at loose ends that evening after abruptly leaving what had become a boring dinner party. At Chumley's I joined a group of pleasant young people, mostly strangers. In snatches of conversation I learned that some of them were recent college graduates who didn't know what to do with their lives except to have a good time, if they could afford it, while waiting to become artists or writers. Peter was the youngest of those at the table and hadn't been to college. He stood out from the others almost like a young prince, distinguished by his air of affability and his easy self-assurance. Unlike his companions of the evening, he knew exactly what he wanted to do, which was to paint.

At later casual meetings he talked about his project for a new picture and told me something about himself. He was then 22 and had been a professional painter, nothing else, for three or four years. He had a gallery that sold some of his paintings at modest prices.* The gallery was owned by a former saloon-keeper, Charles Daniel, one of the two dealers—the other was Alfred Stieglitz—who then displayed an enthusiasm for experimental American art. Daniel had brought together a little stable of painters who later became famous—Demuth, Sheeler, and Kuniyoshi among others— but he was always on the edge of going bankrupt. To Peter he //querrry?*Prices of those early Blumes rose dramatically after 1983, and they sold for increasingly substantial sums, at no profit to the artist. The few available were acquired by collectors or by leading museums—most recently, as of this writing, by the National Museum of American Art. had offered, quite informally, an allowance of I think it was 75 dollars a month, not more. Peter scraped along on that happily and didn't once ask for an accounting. I was never to meet a young artist who thought less about money, so long as he had enough of it to buy paints and canvases.