Life, 1919-12-04 · page 29 of 80
Life — December 4, 1919 — page 29: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a humorous domestic narrative about an amateur painter's disastrous attempt to repaint a room gray without proper preparation. The cartoon illustrates the moment: a shirtless man sits painting while an older bearded gentleman (Uncle Sim) offers unsolicited advice. The satire targets overconfident DIY incompetence. The narrator ignores basic instruction (scraping old paint first), suffers physical consequences (painter's colic, cramps), and produces laughable results—walls that look like "neo-post-impressionistic" chaos, a ceiling resembling measles. Family members mock the outcome, yet he rationalizes failures as intentional artistic effects. The joke's appeal lies in relatable frustration: well-meaning amateurs stubbornly rejecting expert guidance, then paying dearly—literally, through hiring cleaners and a Turkish bath—for their pride. The title suggests this disaster became *Life* magazine's Christmas cover illustration.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
My idea was to paint the room gray. It had been gone over with a kind of pink wash before, but I liked gray as being more refined. “ Aren't you going to scrape the walls first?” said Uncle Sim, judicially pull- ing on his walrus whiskers. “Scrape ’em? Of course not!” I snapped. “Much simpler to put one coat over the other.” There was a good deal of coaching from the side-lines, each one chipping in his two cents’ worth, but I ignored their counsel totally. I had my own conception of how the thing was to be PAINTING THAT CHRISTMAS COVER done, and no one was going to inter- fere with it. I painted two days and achieved: Painter's colic Brusn-wielder’s cramp Sight-seer’s neck The pink wash that originally cov- ered the nakedness of my walls had decomposed into a crumbly sort of powder, which mingled freely with each splash of gray that I applied. In fact, altogether too freely. Sister Psyche said my walls re- sembled a neo - post - impressionistic rainbow. She had seen a Portrait of a Painter's Palette once that was not very unlike. The ceiling, too, when I had fin- ished with it, appeared strangely blotched and broken out, like a gray- faced baby spotted with the measles. I said that it looked like mottled mar- ble. Uncle Sim said it looked like hell. The woodwork took the paint beau- tifully. I took it beautifully, also. The floors responded nobly to the paint. It took two washerwomen at three dollars a day to clean them. It took a Turkish bath, valued at two dollars and tip, to clean me. . . + comicbooks.com