Drawing of house by Charles Sarka,c.1920. Drawing: 6"x 3.75" in a frame: 11"x 9".////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////Charles Nicolas Sarka was born in Chicago in 1879 [7]. His parents were of Czechoslovakian origin, so he could always legitimately claim that he was a true Bohemian. His father was an artistic frame maker, and Charles was encouraged to draw as a child [8], sketching his sisters and copying the pictures that his father framed. By his early teens, he was working for a short-lived comic weekly called The Cricket, for $8 a week [9]. By 16 he was already a staff artist on the Chicago Record, depicting the day’s events – crimes, fires, trials –.in much the same way that press photographers do today. Around this period, he also briefly attended the Art Institute of Chicago. A little later, still possibly in his teens [10], he moved to New York. He shared an apartment with fellow artists Gus Dirks (the creator of the Katzenjammer Kids comic) and John Tarrant. The apartment was in West Fourteenth Street, which “cut right through the heart of Bohemia”. This area drew most of “the young, the new arrivals and the aspiring”, as rents were cheap. In contrast, the acknowledged leaders of the New York art scene clustered in the “de luxe Quartier Latin in West Tenth Street”, which Sarka describes in Tahiti Nui in a hushed tone of mock awe: There one settled in a studio when either fame or old age overtook one. That old shrine, known as the Studio Building, harbored old masters like Chase, La Farge, JC Brown, Louis P.A.L Pinxt … We used to talk in whispers when approaching this shrine of art, where the halls shone with the gleam of varnished oak, the lighting Rembrandtian, plus an academic creak in the great stairs, and a silence so profound you could hear the bats’ wings flutter through the labyrinthian halls [11].Sarka found a job as an illustrator for the New York World and the Herald [12], where he met several artists including George “Pop” Hart [13]. By this time, he had also started painting watercolours in earnest (Fig 1). The good pay he was earning – about $90 week – gave him adequate income to indulge his interest in travel. He realised that he could combine his two interests by going on trips with his artist friends, “blithely seeking the most outlandish corners of the earth for the pure fun of it and using their talents as artists to pay the expenses”[14]. In The Illustrator in America; 1900-1960, Sarka is quoted as saying, “this was my art school: to travel to paint; to paint to travel”[15]. So, in the early years of the century, he camped along the Indian River in Florida, roamed Southern California on horseback, and journeyed to Egypt, typically in conjunction with Pop Hart or other artist friends. PictureFig 1: Charles Sarka, Sister Julia (late 1890s)In 1903, however, an entirely new destination beckoned – Tahiti and the South Seas. THE LURE OF TAHITIFor an artist with such itchy feet, Tahiti must have seemed like a very attractive place. In Tahiti Nui, Sarka attributes his decision to go there to a conversation with Pop Hart in Egypt during one of their sketching trips:The time was evening. A green veil hung between the moon and the Nile... Hart: Where shall we go next? Sarka: Oh, Tahiti I guess. Think we can make it? Hart: Sure we can. I say… what and where’s Tahiti by the way? Sarka: It’s a tropical island somewhere in the South Pacific. Hart: Never mind where it is, Charlie, we’ll find it [16]. With this triumph of optimism over ignorance, Hart accepted Sarka’s suggestion without misgiving. Both men then appear to have forgotten all about it for some months until their return to New York. One morning Hart appeared, waving a steamship ticket. Hart: Well Charles, I’m off, just got my ticket. Don’t forget to meet me there. Sarka: Where? Hart: Why, in Tahiti, as we had planned of course. But the ticket he had purchased read “Good for one passage to Havana”. This was not a mistake by Hart. Nor was it was actually a surprise to Sarka that Hart had decided to travel to Tahiti via Cuba. According to Tahiti Nui [17], Hart had a natural instinct for direction, but an aversion to maps and geography. No matter where he was bound, he always went to Cuba first. Being there gave him his bearings. He could always be counted on to reach his destination, even if it may not have been on scheduled time [18]. As it happened, Sarka decided to stay on in New York for a couple of months to make more money for the trip. Hart wrote to him in gentle protest [19]:Am sorry that I leave … without my old reliable side partner….[I] don’t see why you should want so much money as there is no chance to spend it over there, as we shall get plenty of breadfruit just for the picking, and plenty of fishing.After Hart arrives in Tahiti, he writes again:I pity you up North in the snow and cold. No tourists or beggars here… Bring along some spoon hooks and I’ll show you how to catch some fish. Your old pal [20]. Sarka, finally cashed up, eventually set off, full of anticipation for the adventure ahead. In “leaving the dust of the commonplace behind” to go to Tahiti [21], Sarka was actually following a strong American tradition. In the Western mind, Tahiti represented a place of dreams [22]. Only “discovered” by Europeans in 1767, and proclaimed by Bougainville as a paradise shortly afterwards [23], its remoteness, novelty, physical beauty, leisure and promise of sexual freedom offered relief from a wide variety of dissatisfactions with life at home [24]. For many Americans, in particular, this image had been firmly reinforced by a strong literary tradition, beginning with the writings and letters of American sailors and explorers in the late eighteenth century [25]. The tradition blossomed with the writings of Melville, who provided a counter-image of the America he had left, by portraying happiness as resulting from a freedom from commerce, finance and poverty. With a heady mixture of sex and leisure, and a powerful new concept of the transplanted Western “beachcomber”, Melville’s Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847) exerted far more popular influence in America than the disapproving lecturing of missionary works such as Hiram Bingham’s A Residence of Twenty Years in the Sandwich Islands (1847). Mark Twain soon followed with Roughing It (1872) and Charles Warren Stoddard with South Seas Idylls (1873), in which Tahiti was presented as a cure for urban ills, where the author enjoyed “feasting [his] five senses and finding life a holiday at last”. Stoddard also inspired Robert Louis Stevenson's interest in the South Seas, which culminated in Stevenson and his Californian wife travelling there, resulting in a stream of popular literature based on the Pacific [26]. As an artist, Sarka would also have been particularly influenced by the journey of the eminent American historian Henry Adams [27], who went to Tahiti in the 1890s, accompanied by the artist John La Farge [28] (fig 2)), one of the New York “old masters” Sarka mentions in Tahiti Nui. Adams eventually produced the first history of Tahiti [29], while La Farge also wrote an account of his Tahiti adventures and returned to New York with many paintings [29A], further reinforcing Tahiti’s Gauguin-inspired artistic reputation [30]. For Sarka, all these influences were not just theoretical – one of his very first impressions when he sights Papeete is “Shades of Stevenson, Stoddard and Melville!” [31], and he particularly mentions the feeling of excitement he had when approaching the village of Tautira, “the place where Stevenson once lived and La Farge painted” [32].It is significant also that Sarka was also travelling at the height of the so-called American Renaissance. During this period, which lasted from 1870 to 1920, America witnessed an unprecedented growth in national wealth and political significance, and began to exercise its influence as a major international and commercial power. Its colonial influence in the Pacific region reached its height with the annexation of Hawaii in 1898. Diplomatic and trade expeditions to foreign lands fostered an interest in foreign cultures that was reflected in the art of the period, including an interest in non-western cultures, and fostered a desire for new cultural experiences and exotic subjects [32A}. PictureFig 2: John la Farge, Diadem Mountain at Sunset, Tahiti , c1891IMPRESSIONS OF TAHITIWhen Sarka finally arrived in Tahiti, he looked round the Papeete quayside for his friend: But where was that familiar bearded face? …Around a bend in the beach, I saw a figure in a blue flannel shirt and dungarees, slowly pacing the sand. At my yell, the figure wheeled around and stared. Then suddenly he exploded, “Well, I’ll be damned!.”... We threw our hats high, joined hands, emitted wild and weird whoops, and did a high kick and dance there on the beach…. [33].In fact, he had hardly recognised Hart, who had not shaved for weeks and whose hair “looked like sparrows had been nesting in it”[34]. Like Hart, Sarka quickly fell under Tahiti’s spell: “How delightfully welcome and friendly it all appeared” he commented [35], and he revelled in this seeming-paradise of blue skies, plentiful food, unspoiled environment and friendly locals [36].The two friends lodged in an old abandoned bake shop in a little village called Faaa, just outside Papeete, which they converted into a studio. They used this as a base to which they returned periodically during their extensive travels round Tahiti. They explored a large part of the island on foot, hiking as far as the coastal settlement of Tautira, and spent a month on Moorea where they got to be “great friends” with the natives, “especially the youngsters”[37]. During these travels, they usually boarded with different native families, sometimes sleeping in brass beds which the locals used as ornaments, preferring themselves to sleep on the floor. In a later interview, Sarka describes how they would always return to Papeete on “steamer day”, once a month. There they would put up at the home of the American consul, where Sarka says they would sleep “in one of the queerest rooms I had ever slept in”, piled high with newspapers, with both men being wrapped in old American flags [38]. During their travels round the island, they enthusiastically took part in the rituals and festivals and became immersed in the daily activities of Tahitian life [39]. On many evenings, they were entertained by native musicians. The entire village would often gather together with the artists for a communal meal, followed by musical performances. Often Sarka would join in with his accordion, with Pop playing the bones in a typically unrestrained manner. Their local hosts typically refused to accept money from the artists for their food and lodgings. Sarka found that even leaving money was a grave breach of ethics [40], but honour was often satisfied on both sides by the offer of a portrait sketch as payment. It was a vagabond existence, equivalent to many backpacker/buskers of modern days. Both artists typically spent many hours a day sketching. “Every view was beautiful enough to sketch, every native was picturesque enough to draw. We were busy all the time”, Sarka reported [41]. Their preference was to paint images of people whenever possible and, when it was not, they painted landscapes."

Good condition overall