When I first met Pat Cloar in 1993, only four months had passed since her husband Carroll had died after a four-year battle with cancer. While she was out grocery shopping that April morning, he had taken a gun from a bedside drawer and shot himself in the chest. “I understand why he did it,” Pat told me then, as we talked in her living room. “He was so sick and felt so bad. When he lost his strength and mobility, it was just too much.”
Looking back at that interview nearly 25 years ago, I recall Pat’s lovely gray eyes, her quick laugh, her Arkansas twang softened by a lilt in her voice. I recall how open and honest she was as we visited several times that summer and fall while I researched an article about her husband Carroll Cloar, the world-renowned artist who called Memphis home.
She spoke of how they met in 1973 at Memphis Brooks Museum of Art and the romance sparked by that encounter. Though he was 20 years her senior, Pat told me, “The age difference didn’t matter. He had the best mind and the sharpest wit of anybody I ever knew, and that was a real turn-on for me. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him.” She talked of happy times together: trips to New York, parties by their backyard pool. She talked of his dedication to a work routine that never varied, of the themes in his paintings that reflected his beloved rural roots, of vibrant works that hung in private collections and galleries in Washington, New York, and beyond.
But Pat also knew her husband’s dark side. His hot rages and cold silences. His refusal to yield on issues both large and small. And one evening she called me at home to reveal the facet of his personality that hurt her the most. As she fought tears, I felt she must be probing a wound that had festered for years. She said he never spoke of love to her, and when I suggested that surely there were tender moments in their marriage, she finally answered, “There weren’t any. There really weren’t ...”
Yet shortly before his death she found a note he had written but had never given her. It said: Dear Miss Patty, I have known for a long time that my days were numbered … I think that it is time for me to go. Thanks for all you have done for me. I love you. She never mentioned the note to him, “but it was the first time he expressed his feelings for me.” Despite such withholding on his part, the couple’s inner circle never doubted his love. “Pat meant more to him than anything,” one friend told me in 1993.
Certainly Pat added a dimension to their marriage that her husband lacked. Lively and gregarious, she was a help to him at art receptions, as small talk was an art he’d never mastered. Fiercely protective of her husband and his work, she told of an individual who bought three Cloar paintings — claiming they would hang in his home — and immediately sold them for a huge profit. While not illegal, such an act was unethical, Pat declared, and she called the man and gave him a piece of her mind.
Cloar’s death did not end her fervor for keeping his memory and his work alive. She helped the University of Memphis establish the Cloar Archives in its library’s Special Collections department. Even after she moved to Athens, Georgia, and remarried, she continued her involvement with the Brooks Museum. “She knew so many wonderful stories about her husband’s paintings,” says Brooks Curator Stanton Thomas. “So much of my understanding about Cloar and his work comes from her.” In 2013, she worked with the museum when the Brooks celebrated the 100th anniversary of Cloar’s birth with an exhibition and special events.
That was also the year my own husband died, and Pat sent me a note saying how fortunate I was to know how deeply I was loved. Realizing that Pat had longed for that same affirmation, I found her words especially poignant.
Pat was an adored mother and grandmother, a generous and loving friend, a gifted storyteller, and a teacher and artist in her own right. But most of all she was a champion of her husband and his art, in life and after his death. His legacy will live on, in part at least, because of her unfailing commitment.
Pat Cloar died on October 17, 2017, in Lakeland, Florida.
Marilyn Sadler served as senior editor of Memphis magazine from 1991 to 2015.
