5785. Family Portrait, by Catherine Drinker Bowen (read 7 Apr 2022) This is the fourth book by this author I have read. It is an account of her remarkable family. She had 4 brothers and a sister, all older than her. Her father was president of Lehigh University.. Her oldest brother, Harry Drinker, was a lawyer but also intensely interested in classical music. Her other siblings were also accomplished people and the book tells of them, warts and all. One was an incurable alcoholic but nevertheless accomplished much. I found the book passingly interesting and was amazed by the account of the family.

5785. Family Portrait, by Catherine Drinker Bowen (read 7 Apr 2022) This is the fourth book I've read by this author--the others bein biographies of justice Holmes ( )

Family Portrait by Catherine Drinker Bowen

I came upon this book quite by chance: it has long been on the bottom (and, I admit, dusty) shelf of a small bookcase. The book jacket shows a $7.50 price~~~ this for 301 fascinating pages, illustrated with photographs and pictures painted by Cecilia Beaux.

Reviews already posted here tell of its contents. I have just spent two hours skimming (a lovely way to spend a hot afternoon). ( )

Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897-1973) was a biographer (of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Adams among others) and Family Portrait is her biography of her talented family--the Drinkers of Philadelphia.

Bowen was the youngest of the six children of Henry and Ernesta Drinker and looked up to her older siblings in more ways than one. Her sister, Ernesta, was unusually beautiful and of her four brothers, Harry was a prominent corporate lawyer and an accomplished amateur musician, Cecil was a physician and the first dean of the Harvard School of Public Health and Philip was an engineer and the inventor of the Iron Lung. Her other brother, Jim, led a less exalted life but was the most well-balanced of the siblings according to Bowen.

Bowen wrote this book in her late 60s after the deaths of her parents and two of her brothers (Harry and Cecil). She obviously wanted to protect the privacy of her remaining siblings so it is Harry’s and Cecil’s lives we learn about in the most detail. Both these brothers were extremely successful in work and love, but both seemed to have obsessive traits. Harry’s were channeled into music but Cecil’s found an outlet in alcohol which proved to be his undoing.

At times, I wanted to know more about Bowen herself outside of her role as the youngest child in this family but I had to remind myself that this was not a “tell all” memoir of the kind I’m used to reading today. It was published in 1970 as a “celebration” of the Drinker family and a “mourning” of those members of the family who had passed on.

Bowen is a fantastic writer and does a great job capturing the times and places her family’s lives unfolded in. I loved reading about the brothers and sisters skating on the frozen Lehigh Canal while the fires from the Bethlehem steel works glowed in the distance like a version of hell (her father was President of Lehigh University at the time), their Grand Tour of Europe in the years before the first World War, and the annual summer idles at their house in Beach Haven, New Jersey.

This ended up being one of my favorite books of 2010 and I’m giving it 4 1/2 stars. Highly recommended look at what it was like to be part of a loving and competitive family “for whom excellence was the starting point.” ( )

“This book is a celebration and a mourning,” are the first words of Catherine Drinker Bowen in “A Family Portrait.” The book is a biography of her family, the Drinkers, and is a backward glance at a simpler and more genteel times written with the self-awareness of the 60's. The book was published in 1970 and so must have been written in the aftermath of one of the most revolutionary years in 20th century. In 1968 Martin Luther King had been gunned down, the Prague Spring had ended violently with the invasion of Czechloslovakia by the Soviet Union, and the North Vietnamese had launched the Tet offensive. In he year it was published 4 students were killed at Kent State. I think she celebrates and mourns not only her very distinguished family but the times they lived in as well. Drinker was the youngest of six siblings and only the second girl living in Philadelphia in the early years of the 20th century. They had a highly competitive upbringing that included music, summers at the beach, various tutors, athletics (for the boys) and of course the requisite eccentric relatives including an aunt, Cecilia Beaux, who was a successful portrait painter. Almost all the family went on to become accomplished and ambitious (perhaps too much so) in their fields of law, medicine, engineering and, of course, writing. And through it all you can feel the strong bonds between family members. In their later years, many of them would spend their summers together at the beach and they lived quite near each other the rest of the year as well.
I felt nostalgia reading it, though I know good and well I would hate living in that era, such is the quality of Bowen's writing. Even the history of her brother Cecil, the most tragic figure in the family, is quite remarkable if only for his tremendous professional output and his self knowledge. All in all a great read. ( )

In Family Portrait Bowen paints, in an modest and quiet way quite in character with her roots, a portrait of her truly gifted and remarkable Philadelphia family (her aunt was the painter Cecilia Beaux) by delving into her roots and exploring, albeit with a delicacy unheard of nowadays, some of the psychological issues that seem to go hand in hand with strong character and near (or actual) genius. Bowen, at 73, in 1970, was a master of her craft and while, at times, the narrative sometimes seems to get caught in eddies of smaller details-- those are lighter moments in an overall darker pattern. Of the six children, four made significant accomplishments in law, writing, and medicine. Of those four, one, Cecil, perhaps the one in their generation most like aunt Cecilia Beaux, lived the uneasy life of unacknowledged alcoholism. If the memoir has a theme, which I think it does, it is exploring the narrow edge between driving yourself to accomplish great things, and driving yourself (and those around you) mad. To those who like memoirs, especially those that follow the development of several generations of an interesting and admirable family (from the mid 19th century to about 1950) Family Portrait is a classic read and I highly recommend it. ***** ( )