painting, which featured carousing sailors and women, included a stereotypical homosexual solicitation and erotic exaggeration of clinging pants seats and bulging crotches. It was the subject of a public outcry led by Admiral Hugh Rodman, who protested to Secretary of the Navy Claude A. Swanson, saying, "It represents a most disgraceful, sordid, disreputable, drunken brawl." Secretary Swanson stated that the painting was "right artistic" but "not true to the Navy." The painting was removed from exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery by Henry L. Roosevelt, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy at the time, and kept in his home until Roosevelt's death in 1936. The publicity helped to launch Cadmus's career, and he stated at the time, "I had no intention of offending the Navy. Sailors are no worse than anybody else. In my picture I merely commented on them – I didn't criticize." The painting, which after Roosevelt's death hung over a mantel at the Alibi Club in Washington for more than half a century, was kept from public view until 1981, temporarily displayed at the Wolfsonian Museum in Miami, and eventually found a home at the Naval Historical Center. In 1938, his painting Pocahantas Saving the Life of John Smith, a mural painted for the Parcel Post Building in Richmond, Virginia, had to be retouched when some observers noticed a fox pelt suggestively hanging between the legs of an Indian depicted in the painting. Cadmus used his then lover, Jared French, as the model for John Smith in the mural. In 1940, two paintings, Sailors and Floozies (1938) and Seeing the New Year In, were removed from public view because the Navy "didn't like it" and there was "too much smell about it." The paintings were being exhibited at the Golden Gate International Exposition and were removed, while a third, Venus and Adonis, remained. The office of Commissioner George Creel was told by the Navy that the painting, Sailors and Floozies, was "unnecessarily dirty." Artistic style Cadmus, considered to be a master draftsman, was interested in the Italian Renaissance artists, particularly Signorelli and Mantegna, the so-called "masters of muscle." He was also influenced by Reginald Marsh, an American scene painter. Cadmus combined the elements of Signorelli and Mantegna along with Marsh to depict the street life of New York City. He was transfixed by the human body, both the ideal and the repulsive. His ideal was a stylized erotic