Probing westward along the streets of Manhattan, the first light of Sunday, October 29,1933, revealed, stretched out in a doorway on Sixth Avenue, near Fifty-second Street, under the el, a well-dressed elderly man, solidly built and balding, with a little patch of fine white hair, an inverted triangle, at the center of his forehead. He was dead. Letters in an inside jacket pocket identified him as George B. Luks, the artist, of 140 East Twenty-eighth Street, and an examination of his corpse established that he had been felled by a heart attack. Most of the dead man’s friends assumed, on learning of his death, that he had met his end in a drunken brawl. This assumption was consistent with the hour of his demise and with its location in a district filled with speakeasies (Prohibition had five weeks left to run), but as no autopsy was performed, people could interpret the available data in whatever way they chose, the author of Luks’s profile in the Dictionary of American Biography, for one, solemnly asserting that the painter had been struck down “as he was studying the effect of the sunrise on a typical New York scene.”

So perished, at sixty-seven, a man about whom the critic James Gibbons Huneker of the New York Sun had written that “it is absolutely impossible to pin down on paper any adequate description of him. He is Puck. He is Caliban. He is Falstaff. He is a tornado. He is sentimental. He can sigh like a lover and curse like a trooper. Sometimes you wonder over his versatility: a character actor, a low comedian, even a song-and-dance man, a poet, a profound sympathizer with human misery and a human orchestra. The vitality of him!”

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