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Who is Louis Welden Hawkins?

Self-Portrait (1890)

Louis Welden Hawkins (1849-1910) shown here in 1890, about 15 years after meeting George Moore in Paris as a fellow art student at the Académie Julian. Rodolphe Julian painted them into in a picture elsewhere in this Iconography, with Hawkins sporting this dashing beard and Moore his sloping shoulders.

Hawkins was a model for Lewis Seymour, a character in his friend’s first novel A Modern Lover (1883); he appeared as himself (under a pseudonym) in Moore’s memoir Confessions of a Young Man (1888).

The young men were flatmates in the Passage des Panoramas, a moment’s walk from art classes. Their social paths diverged when Moore decided not to pursue a career in art and instead become a writer; Hawkins stayed the course and was successful as a symbolist painter, true to his character in Moore’s memoir.

No portrait of Moore by Hawkins has surfaced, though it seems likely to exist. Hawkins’ painting was never noticed in Moore’s art criticism.