Picture by James Clark Tidden, Villa d’Este, 1923.

https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1223147/m2/1/high_res_d/HETAG_Newsletter_No7_201609_September_Houston_in_Europe.pdf

And who is James Clark Tidden?

In pursuit of a short story idea, I’ve been reading about Rice University’s early days. Rice had an architecture and art department right from the start (1912) and, right from the start, they seem to have behaved like the European artists that Dorothy Sayers wrote about in Strong Poison, her first story about Harriet Vane, creating an atmosphere of ‘hectic passion.’ The behavior also shows up in Five Red Herrings, Sayers’ story about artists in Scotland. The general wife-swapping, taking lovers, etcetera, shows up as well in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, when Ann (murder suspect) falls for some Russian artist who goes around sweeping women up in his arms. He does it because it’s his schtick, but she falls hard for the guy, who never meant anything and just moves on.

Anyway, one of the first art and architecture professors, James Clark Tidden, left Rice Institute in December of 1925, the middle of the student year. The Campanile, which is the student publication, contained accolades for him, explaining how wonderful he was to his students. Some students were not quite so wonderful in return. He had a student, by name, Julien Muench. About a year after Tidden left, Julien and Tidden’s wife, Agnes who had divorced him, got married.

Muench’s biography also includes the wild detail that he created a plastics company in later life, making a clear plastic prototypes for artificial hearts, as well as parts for submarine periscopes. Okay, he was a sculptor… https://www.askart.com/bio/Julian_Muench/10038367/Julian_Muench

Muench also participated in a “hoax” in 1935, whereby he and a psychology professor from Rice University collaborated to send paintings to an exhibition of modern art, to prove that anything would get accepted. The story is here …
https://randytibbits.substack.com/p/the-great-houston-art-hoax-of-1935 … with pictures
… and the problem with the whole premise is that Muench was, in fact, an artist. He may have made an unserious picture, that he himself felt wasn’t art, but his worst work would still be better than art produced by an untrained, unskilled, non-artist.

Reading about real people reminds me that my fictional characters are truly fiction. Reality is incredibly strange.