Paul Goadby Stone might be the most significant Savannah artist you’ve never heard of. With his upcoming lecture “Paul Goadby Stone: In Search of Beauty,” set for May 23 at The Learning Center, longtime Savannah Morning News columnist Bill Dawers is hoping to change that.
“Paul Goadby Stone, among local collectors, among people who have been in Savannah for a long time, people who have followed art for a long time, he is regarded as a really important artist who was in Savannah,” Dawers said of the artist, who died in 1976. “He was a really, really talented figurative artist.”
“An artist that might go somewhere”
Stone was born in Lumberton, North Carolina, but most of his early years were spent traveling the world, a product of his father’s work as a chaplain for the U.S. Navy. Eventually, his family settled in the Boston suburb of Swampscott, Massachusetts, and he and his two brothers attended the prestigious Phillips Academy of Andover, the same school Frank Stella would go to a decade later. He then went on to Harvard and, after graduating, lived in Boston proper for several years.
As Dawers tells it, Stone had “the beginnings of a career as an artist that might go somewhere.” Even prior to his move to Savannah in 1957, he’d established a reputation as a quality portrait artist, having been listed among artists to contact in the region by Portraits, Inc., a prestigious organization that exists to this day. And by the 1960s, he had gallery representations in Cincinnati, Ohio and Cape Cod, allowing his work to proliferate in those areas. He even had famous clientele such as Julias Fleischmann, of Fleischmann’s yeast fame, and the Taft family.
But under the surface, things were less rosy.
“It’s well understood that he had mental health issues before moving here,” Dawers related. “He already had a reputation throughout that time as just a very difficult person; very smart, very well educated, very charismatic, but somebody who could just needle people, somebody who could be very dismissive, somebody who had a lot of opinions.”
He’d married well-connected Savannahian Adeline Oxnard in 1961, but they divorced in 1968, an ugly split that lead to additional personal struggles, and a certain level of ostracization by affluent locals. Then, in 1976, he covered himself in gasoline, lit a match, and took his own life.
“He progressively, over at least the last 10 years of his life, he more and more frequently made threats of suicide,” Dawers said. “He…had diagnosable mental illnesses [that] continued for a long time, he was seeing multiple doctors, [and he] might have been abusing prescription drugs.”
Reestablishing a Legacy
After his death, Stone slowly faded from public consciousness. Although his artistic output was prolific (“He produced a lot of work,” said Dawers), much of it was scattered among collectors, friends, family, and even his models, whom he’d pay with artwork. He also left a lot of pieces behind, but much of that work, including sketches literally cut out of the artist’s sketchbooks, went to dealers.
In 1988, a so-called retrospective of Stone’s work took place in Savannah at New Southern Paintings, a gallery that used to reside at 536 E. State St., but it failed to include virtually any of his most important works. Beyond that, his paintings and drawings were only seen in public at auction, or in the few locations where they were put on display, in odd places like a doctor’s lounge at Candler Hospital, and in the Bishop’s residence near the Cathedral Basilica of St. John the Baptist (Stone did a portrait of Bishop Thomas J. McDonough in the early 1960s).
Fortunately, however, Dawers, as a local arts columnist, was a frequent visitor to the areas auction houses, and sometime around the year 2000, he became aware of Stone’s work. He eventually even went on to become a collector. Then in 2021, more than two decades after first having fallen in love with the artist’s creations, a conversation with Everard Auctions head Amanda Everard started him down the path that has lead to his upcoming lecture at The Learning Center.
“Amanda and I are talking, and it’s like, ‘Alright, this guy died in 1976, there’s all this work out there, but nobody knows where it is,” Dawers recalled. “And also, there are these people who knew him, who are still alive, but who are getting older.
“Somebody’s gotta not only just figure out where some of this work is, but also find out more about his life,” he went on to say, “before everyone who knew him is gone.”
Dawers’s presentation, set to last two hours, will look to fill in many of the blanks that currently exist in Stone’s story, from his creative process, to his sexual orientation, to the controversy around the artist’s death (spoiler alert: Not everyone believes it was a suicide). But even two-and-a-half years into researching the talented artist who died far too young, the columnist and Georgia Southern professor acknowledges that his work on the subject is not yet complete. In fact, he’s got his fingers crossed that some of the folks that knew Stone might come out to the talk to add their own pieces of history with the artist to the story.
“There are a lot of people in Savannah who knew Paul Stone, who are still alive, still active,” he said. “I hope that this will give everyone, including me, a fuller picture.”
If You Go >>
What: “Paul Goadby Stone: In Search of Beauty”
When: 5 to 7 p.m., May 23
Where: The Learning Center, 3025 Bull St.
Tickets: $15 members, $20 general public
Info: seniorcitizensinc.org/the-learning-center
