"A thing worth doing is worth doing well," my mother
used to say. With cliches such as this and by example, she managed to instill a work
ethic in me and a degree of self discipline. Necessity was her ally. I watched her paint, sat
for my portrait (not a pleasant experience), attended museums and galleries with her in New York,
and was surrounded by paintings in our home.
I suppose we were living in poverty but, despite this, her portrait ability and love of art, as
well as having been raised in a prominent Boston family, gave my mother a positive sense of herself
which extended to me. For no rational reason that I could detect she believed I would do well in life.
I suspect that this unwavering and, at the time, unwarranted belief produced a positive result. My
memories from those early years are not unpleasant.
Portraits of artist Robert Toth by my mother, Grace Higgins, Oil 36" x 24" and Pastel on Board 20" x 16" circa 1965.
I liked school well enough but never applied myself. My free time was spent raising hell, pigeons and small
animals, as well as shooting pool and working at every menial job I could find. The police put me on
probation a few times and frightened my mother with predictions of jail time. I was held back in the
seventh grade for truancy and bad grades and, many years later, was thrown from a car I crashed one drunken night
in Patterson, New Jersey. From these disadvantageous beginnings I managed to survive in tact, changed
course and became a successful artist. The following is the story of the learning that made such a
thing possible.
I was born Eugene Douglas Higgins, in September of 1939. My father, Eugene Francis Higgins, passed away
when I was three years old leaving my mother, a half-sister, our Scottie and me destitute. My mother,
Grace Louise Higgins, nee Whalley, and her first husband, Samuel Burtis Baker, were both artists. Burt
Baker was described to me by my mother as a man leading the ultimate life, the life of an artist. I
met him in my early teens and he, and my mother's stories about him, had a great influence on me. It
was a foregone conclusion that I would become an artist as well. Manifest destiny. (For information on
Baker see American Art Review magazine, Feb-Mar 1994, pp. 110-115.)
When I was eleven or twelve years old, I can remember walking along Valley Road near my grammar
school in Montclair, New Jersey and thinking, 'There are beautiful paintings inside me, all I have to
do is find a way to get them out.' I took art classes in high school, attended college as an art major
(after a required extra year of high school) and quit because all they taught was modern art.
The following three years, I later came to see, were mostly wasted at an inadequate art school in
Newark, New Jersey.
Pencil copy of a photograph done while at the Newark School. Age 18
After the Army and in my twenties, I was working as a commercial artist at the
Prudential Insurance Company in the Public Relations and Advertising Department. The director of my
department was Henry Gasser, a well-known watercolor artist, and when I told him I wanted to continue
my art studies he suggested the Frank Reilly School of Art. When I was applying to get into Mr. Reilly's school,
I showed him the pencil drawing of the boxers pictured above. He glanced at it and said, "Yes, I can help you with that".
In addition to teaching, Frank Joseph Reilly was a fine artist, illustrator, muralist, syndicated
columnist, after dinner speaker, film producer (on Dean Cornwell, James Montgomery Flagg etc.) and lecturer. He was respected not only for the high quality of his work
as an artist and teacher but for the professional achievements of his students. While he was teaching
at the Art Students League, (29 years), there was up to a three year waiting list for his classes
and his formal lectures were standing-room only. He had studied with George B. Bridgman for drawing,
Frank Vincent Du Mond for painting and Dean Cornwell for murals.
He had developed the skill of disaggregating the complexities of realism and communicating to his
students clearly and specifically. I commuted to Manhattan five nights a week to attend classes at
his night school and had finally found a teacher. For the first time in my life I became a
dedicated student and came to believe that if I learned what he was teaching I would have a chance at a career in art. It was an honor and a great help financially when he appointed me
monitor, first in the drawing and later in the painting class. A monitor paid no tuition, called the poses, kept order,
started off new students and locked up the school.
I never missed a night in the over four years I was with him up until his untimely death. The
night before he went into the hospital he said, "Well, good night, Hig." and I had to help him
find his coat. I stood in the darkened hallway and watched him slowly walk to the elevator
and disappear inside. I never saw him again and the only testaments I can offer are this book and
the life he gave me that I have loved.
While studying with Mr. Reilly, which is what we all called him, my ambition was to become an
illustrator, nearly the only career open to a representational artist in New York at the time. In order to study original illustrations,
I would attend exhibitions at the Society of Illustrators where the highest quality current work
(some by former Reilly students) could be seen as well as a permanent collection. The best
illustrators were skilled in the basic drawing and painting methods I was in the process of
learning. These awe-inspiring skills, so painstakingly developed by artists down through the
centuries, had been discarded by the various modern art, 'Isms-of-the-week.'
"Only an auctioneer should admire all schools of art." - Oscar Wilde.
