Considered the “most beautiful home in Taxco”, guests and visitors to the villa during the Casa Davis era from 1930 to 1942 was a Who’s Who of arts and literature included nearly all the “Mexican School” artists above, artists from various other movements such as Tamiji Kitigawa, surrealists Wolfgang Paalen and Robert Motherwell, social realist Howard Cook, muralists Pablo O’Higgins and Marion Greenwood, Taxco silver pioneer and next door neighbor William Spratling, as well as political notables Soviet exile Leon Trotsky, John Dewey protégé Moises Saenz, and US Ambassador Dwight Morrow; writers such as John Dos Passos (The American Trilogy, and rumored to have invented the drink ‘Berta’ at Bar Berta), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited), Nobel Prize laureate William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury), Pulitzer Prize winner and celebrated chef Katherine Anne Porter (Ship of Fools), Patricia Highsmith (The Talented Mr. Ripley), Saul Bellow (Herzog), patron of the arts Mabel Dodge Luhan, poet Hart Crane, playwright Tennessee Williams (A Streetcar Named Desire) Clinton King days), cinema pioneer and Soviet propagandist Sergei Eisenstein, and composer Cole Porter, rumored to have written his musical “Mexican Hayride” in Bar Berta next to the Zocalo in front of Santa Prisca Church.

 

Artist Clinton King acquired the property in 1945.  A minor “Lost Generation” artist who moved to Mexico from Paris in 1940 immediately prior to the Nazi occupation with his first wife Lady Duff Twysden, the role model for “Lady Brett” in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”, King originally hailed from Fort Worth, Texas, where his father invented the popular “Millionaire” candy and owned the King Candy Company before selling to Pangburn’s.  King met his second wife, Narcissa Swift, heiress of the Chicago Swift Packing family and later Civil Rights activist, through their mutual friend Georgia O’Keefe.  O’Keefe’s painting “Narcissa’s Last Orchid” is today in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum of Art.  The Kings built out an art studio above the old servant’s quarters in the gatehouse in 1951, the space now known as the “Studio Apartment”.  It was during the King’s tenure that notables such as playwright Tennessee Williams (A Streetcar Named Desire) and xxxxx were guests on the property.