Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, November 20, 1994                   TAG: 9411220020
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

EXHIBIT SHOWS THAT SALEM HASN'T FORGOTTEN ITS BEST-LOVED ARTIST

Nor has Salem forgotten its best-loved artist son.

Biggs - an illustrator whose work appeared in mass circulation magazines for half a century, and who once hobnobbed with George Bellows, Edward Hopper, Frederic Remington and Winslow Homer - is the subject of a small retrospective at the Salem Museum.

"Walter Biggs: Impressions of Salem," will be on exhibit through Dec. 16. Included are a number of paintings Biggs did of Salem, where he returned to spend the last years of his life.

"It's just a kind of a small thing we wanted to do as a tribute to Mr. Biggs," said the museum's director, Mary Hill.

Biggs was born in Elliston. The family moved, house and all, to College Street in Salem when Biggs was 12.

By that time, the young artist-to-be had already taken a correspondence course in pen-and-ink drawing.

Biggs attended Virginia Polytechnic Institute for a year - but at 17 boarded a train to New York City, to try his luck.

His work was soon appearing in Young's Magazine and Field and Stream. Over the next 50 years, Biggs' work appeared, among other places, in McCall's, Woman's Home Companion, Cosmopolitan, Ladies' Home Journal, Harper's Magazine and Vogue.

He is said to have received $4,000 to $5,000 a drawing at the peak of his popularity.

Biggs came home often. In the 1960s he finally closed his New York studio for good; for years he looked after his invalid mother and an older sister, called Miss Lucy, in Salem.

He died in 1968.

A perfectionist, Biggs painted many of his illustrations in full color, even when the finished product was slated for reproduction in a magazine in black-and-white, say those familiar with his work.

"He was very particular about getting it just right," said Hill.

In addition to his magazine illustrations he painted stand alone work as well - as did better-known contemporaries such as Hopper and Bellows. The value of these works by Biggs is still rising among area collectors.

A number of Biggs' impressionistic paintings of Salem are included in the show at the Salem Museum, along with an array of magazine illustrations, a photograph of Biggs and his model-wife - from whom he was soon divorced, never to remarry - and the junk mail he routinely covered with his sketches and scribbles.

Included are paintings of his mother and sister, the Denit Home, the Presbyterian Church and the predominantly black neighborhood around Water Street - the last apparently a favorite subject.

Also included in the exhibit is the undecipherable sketch Biggs is said to have done on his deathbed. He spoke that day to a friend of light, shadows, color and the paintings he meant to do before he died.

Linda Atkinson, director of Roanoke College's Olin and Smoyer galleries, said she loves the Salem artist's work. The college, where Biggs was once artist-in-residence, owns 36 of Biggs' paintings.

"They're very lose and painterly," she said of Biggs' canvases, "and yet he can be very precise, too. He's very good at capturing a mood."

The college currently is seeking paintings by Biggs for an exhibition planned for August through October, Atkinson said.

"Walter Biggs: Impressions of Salem": Through Dec. 17, Salem Museum and Historical Society, Longwood Park, Salem, 389-6760.