Untitled [Artist and onlookers]

Although the central, bespectacled figure in this small composition does not appear to be the artist himself, the scene does evoke a meeting of what Barton called his Academia Vinciana. David Archer Nelson (b. 1941), a member of this group of largely unknown artists, recollected, “At one time there were half a dozen of us or more, in North Beach, all using yatates, painting at café tables. We often sat at the same tables working together, Barton of course holding court.” Nelson also recalled that when Barton, a voracious reader, encountered a similarly erudite interlocutor, they would argue “beautifully in the Socratic style.”