Pat de Groot (1930-2018)
“Pat de Groot, a painter who embodied an era when the beaches and dunes at the tip of Cape Cod were peopled with artistic geniuses and incorrigible eccentrics — often in the form of the same person — died on July 26 [2018] in Brewster, Mass. She was 88.
“‘Bohemian royalty’ was how the director John Waters described Ms. de Groot in a 2016 interview with the Provincetown Banner. She certainly had the carriage of royalty, or at least of someone who did not much care what you thought about her. Few of her neighbors in the East End of Provincetown knew she was actually descended from American royalty: Isidor Straus of New York, the co-owner of Macy’s, who died on the Titanic.
“Ms. de Groot came late to painting, in her mid-40s. But for the next four decades she was prolific, using a palette knife to etch dozens and dozens of scintillating, layered, small-scale seascapes of Provincetown Harbor as seen from the home and studio she designed for herself and her husband, Nanno de Groot, in 1962.
“‘I want to grab a piece of all this, of this sacred place, and say something with paint about the sky and the sea and the horizon and how it affects me,’ Ms. de Groot said on the occasion of a 2015 show at the Acme Fine Art gallery in Boston.
“Until she was well in her 80s, Ms. de Groot would kayak out to the harbor breakwater, where hundreds of cormorants congregate. From close-up observation, she used a black marker to portray birds of individual distinction, ‘each profile worthy of a Hapsburg prince,’ Philip Hoare wrote in a 2017 memoir, RisingTideFallingStar.
“For respite, Ms. de Groot would sunbathe, naked, in the dunes of the Cape Cod National Seashore, which virtually surrounds Provincetown. ‘National park rangers have threatened to issue her with a ticket for flouting the bylaws,’ Mr. Hoare wrote. ‘Pat tells them they can do what they like; she’s been doing this for 70 years, and she’s not about to stop now.'”
From my obituary in The New York Times.