He was a friend of Maximilian Kramm, the once renowned European pianist who was now teaching nondescript pupils. It was Kramm who proposed to the merchant that they visit me and commission me to make a portrait. He stood posing for me for about an hour, dressed in a suit fit to kill. With rimless glasses pinched on his nose, he was elegance personified.

The lips are typically American. Nowhere will you see a mouth so thin as on older Americans. Even Italians, Poles, living in this marvelous Civilization as Americanized foreigners, have something happen to their mouths. Their lips completely alter so that, when closed, the mouth looks like a mousetrap that just caught a mouse and either has to free it, or will be obliged to swallow it. Apart from this, they get folds in their cheeks on each side of the mousetrap. When I first came to America as a twelve year old, I noticed these traits on the face of my beautiful teacher. She had these sharp wrinkles an inch away from the corners of her mouth. Even then I could not make up my mind if it was the pronunciation of English words causing this, or the tensions of daily life in this Civilization.

Had the Grain Merchant been a labor leader, he could have made a Dictator, for the roll of fat in the back of his neck classes him, in my system of thinking, with the Yetinsyny (the sons of the Yeti), the world's Empire builders.

He looked formidable with his tin-can lips, his high collar, and shiphulk shoulders, bringing to my mind the silly notion to liken him to a grain silo. So I made this clay portrait much larger than life-size, altering his profile where the pinched nose-skin folded.