Nathwell - 'Nat' - Tate was born on the 7th March 1928, probably in Union Beach, New Jersey. His mother, Mary (née Tager), told him his father had been a fisherman from Nantucket who had drowned at sea before Nat had been born. The regular contradictions and elaborations of Mary Tate's story (Nathwell senior was variously a submariner, a naval architect, a merchant seaman killed 'in a war', a deep sea diver) later convinced his son that he was in fact illegitimate. However, there was in all the versions a link with the sea and, with ominous symbolism, the death was always the same - drowning. In his darker moments he fantasised that his mother had been a dockside whore and that he was the product of a swift and carnal midnight coupling with a sailor. Whether this man was still alive, or who he actually was, Nat would clearly never know. He decided that his mother had had, in her imagination, his father 'drowned' as a punishment and as a mark of her own shame. It is plausible, though perhaps a little fanciful, to find some psychological sources here for the Bridge drawings: to see the bridges - simple, clear, strong - as a way of traversing safely the dark and turbulent water below, to walk, unsmirched and untouched, over the rebarbative flotsam and jetsam on the river bed beneath.

No one knows when Nat Tate began his Bridge sequence, or why he was so taken with the Hart Crane poem. The best guess puts it some time in 1950. Certainly when Janet Felzer first saw some of the drawings in 1952 their numberings were already up in the 80s and 90s.

Janet Felzer (1922-1977) was an energetic and influential figure in the New York gallery world of the 1950s. A moderately talented painter herself (she had studied in Rome), she founded one of the early co-op galleries in the late '40s called Aperto. The co-op galleries were a short-lived phenomenon, vaguely inspired, as the name indicates, by the concept of a guild or brotherhood, established by groups of young and little known artists who wanted a space to show their work. They each made a contribution to the running costs and were thereby entitled to hang their paintings on the gallery's walls - usually a downtown loft or warehouse space. The most famous of the co-op galleries was in Jane Street in Greenwich Village where Larry Rivers first showed.

	2 of 6