COBY WHITMORE. "`Poor boy! You want me so much,' she said, as if lust were a condition to be pitied." Feature illustration for the story "What ritual is being observed tonight?" by John Le Carré, published in The Saturday Evening Post, November 2, 1968. Acrylic on board. 594x454 mm; 23 1/2x17 3/4 inches. Signed in lower left image; stamp on matte board verso (removed from original image). Mounted between layers of foam in window matte. Framed to 29 1/2x24 inches. A copy of the magazine accompanies the artwork.
Le Carré, the famous author of espionage thrillers, wrote only four short stories over the course of his long career. Two of them were printed in The Saturday Evening Post. This tale, however, does not follow his usual genre and, instead, follows its protagonist as he grapples with head versus heart. Coby Whitmore, then, was the perfect artist to tackle this eternal struggle, placing the passionate but restrained connection between the two at the center of the image, igniting that emotion with the red hot of the bedspread and the florals of her skirt.
