Art: A Century of the River

MONUMENTAL GRANDEUR OF THE MISSISSIPPI SHOWN IN A MAGNIFICENT SCENIC MIRROR COVERING 15,000 FEET OF CANVAS, ILLUSTRATING THE SPLENDID SCENES THAT OCCUR UPON THE FATHER OF RIVERS.

That attraction, advertised in facsimiles of century-old handbills, was just one of the highlights of a show that jammed the St. Louis City Art Museum last week. A “Mississippi Panorama” of 347 paintings, prints and riverboat models and mementos, the exhibition had been put together by bustling 38-year-old Museum Director Perry Rathbone, who first thought of it while he was serving in a New Caledonia naval base during the war. “I was suffering from a strong attack of nostalgia,”Rathbone explains. His idea was to “reveal the look and character of the mid-continent’s waterways and of the life they created and sustained in the 19th Century.”

Myths & Marvels. Every half-hour a small group of museum visitors was ushered into a gallery that had been made over to look like a gimcracked Victorian theater. The antique chandelier dimmed, and on stage the “Magnificent Scenic Mirror” (which Rathbone had found in the University of Pennsylvania Museum cellar) was slowly unrolled. Painted on muslin, it showed the myths and marvels of the Mississippi valley as sketched or imagined by one Dr. Montroville W. Dickeson, a Burton Holmes of the 1850s, and executed by the “eminent Irish artist” John J. Egan. What Egan’s effort lacked in accuracy and technique was more than made up for by its scope and unfailing liveliness.It was a rare example of a recent but lost art, as far removed from the modern as New Caledonia is from the Mississippi.

The exhibition spanned a century, from the meticulous White Hall Plantation painted by Christophe Colomb about 1800, to a mist-shrouded painting of the river at night, done in 1905 by Frederick Oakes Sylvester. Between the two were a handful of great and near-great artists: naturalist-painters such as John James Audubon, Missouri’s George Caleb Bingham who immortalized the river’s roistering flatboatmen, and Indian Painters Charles Bodmer and George Catlin.

In Place of Patrons. It was a show calculated to arouse the same “strong attack of nostalgia” that had inspired Rathbone to stage it. To conservatives who might question the art quality of the packet-boat china, menus and bills of lading that Rathbone had interspersed among the river canvases, Showman Rathbone had a commonsense reply: “The first job is to get the people into our museums. The future of art belongs to them and not to the recherche group of the last century. The age of the private patron is gone, and the mass support required to take its place must be preceded by mass appreciation.”

Director Rathbone seemed to be getting the mass appreciation. At week’s end, visitors were packing into his museum at a faster rate than at any time since last winter, when 228,000 came to see the traveling exhibit of Berlin art masterpieces. Rathbone’s exhibit was also getting huzzas from other museum men. Said a visiting expert from Louisiana: “It should be shown in every city on the Mississippi River.”