Paul Humphrey
(1931–1999)
BornPoultney, Vermont, United States
ActiveBrattleboro, Vermont, United States
BiographyPaul Humphrey’s drawings offer a voyeuristic perspective on women sleeping, the framing intimately tight on their closed eyes and sometimes exposed skin. Although most of the portraits are of heads and shoulders resting on pillows, he also depicted full figures asleep against fields of color. More infrequently, he created images of women awake, all heavily detailed with crayon, ink, and colored pencil. Dapples of black reveal his process of photocopying images from magazines such as Playboy and from mail-order catalogues as the basis for these works, which he filled with color and then diverted from his source material by adding the closed eyes with white-out tape. These would regularly be copied again and further altered with line and color. He wrote on the pages titles such as “Sherri Asleep” or “June Alden Awake,” referencing the movie stars and models who were his frequent muses, regularly signing just his initials, “P. H.,” in a corner.When Humphrey was creating these hundreds of “sleeping beauties” in the 1980s and 1990s, he would claim that he was first inspired by his daughter’s yearbook photographs, but following his death in 1999, it was revealed that he never married or had any children. Humphrey was born in 1931 in Poultney, Vermont, and spent his entire life in the state. He served a stint in the military after high school, later working in road construction. In 1971, he moved to Brattleboro, picking up jobs including taxi driving, working in a repair garage, and house painting. A decline in his health forced him to retire, and his drawing practice emerged during this uncertain time.
Humphrey exhibited some of this work locally, and his obituary in the Burlington Free Press stated that he was “an accomplished portrait artist with his work being featured at a number of galleries over the years.” Questions remain about why he was compelled to make so many of these works, in which women appear in the peaceful yet vulnerable quiet of sleep, and to imagine a backstory linking them to a fictional family. As he once stated of this art, “It is my entire life, it is everything I have.”
Allison C. Meier, 2025
Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).