I'm Dr. James Denean and I'm a primary care internist at the National Hospital in Boston

where I practice for 45 years and retired from patient care in 2008.

James Denean is looking through some photographs from a long time ago.

This is my sitting Alice Neal's backyard.

This is Alice beginning the portrait.

Alice Neal was a painter born in 1900.

Her specialty was painting people, what you and I might call portraits, but she didn't

care for that word.

Neal was resistant to the genre of portraiture, which she associated with status and wealth.

That's Kelly Baum.

She's a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Stuffy, stiff, uninspired, overly romanticized without a critical or radical spirit.

Neal preferred to call her paintings pictures of people that are also history.

Neal's pictures are always more than just the person they represent.

Baum recently co-curated a massive Alice Neal retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum.

It was called People Come First.

The vast majority of the people Neal painted were not well known.

Dr. James Denean fits that description well.

One day on the opposite side I'd like to paint you.

So this is in early 1984.

And my son and I drove down to spring-white New Jersey.

And she painted me in her backyard.

...