Art: Oil & Salt

Manhattan’s massive Metropolitan Museum of Art lay awash this week in a show of pictures and ship models illustrating the history of the U.S. Navy. It was the un-arty kind of exhibition that brings in people who ordinarily would not bother to go into an art museum. It also included some topgallant art.

One of the earliest and best paintings on show was Edward Savage’s formal portrait of Commodore Abraham Whipple, the hard-bitten New Englander who won the first sea battle of the Revolution, off Jamestown, R.I. and later snatched eight ships by stealth from a British convoy of 150. Savage’s Whipple, magnificently bedecked for the occasion in a scarlet, gold-braided waistcoat and cocked hat, looked duck-footed, paunchy, and tough as a saltwater Punch.

Up to World War I, sea battles were painted almost entirely from hearsay, which did not necessarily interfere with their quality as art. Thomas Birch’s oil of the set-to between the United States and the British Macedonian in 1812 had a familiar and a handsome air. It was the fish’s-eye view typical of the period-splendid, stormy and bloodless.

In World War II the Navy had such able painters as Dwight Shepler and Pepsi-Cola Prizewinner Mitchell Jamieson (TIME, Oct. 4) on duty as artists. Shepler’s carrier flight deck at night and Jamieson’s D-day off the Normandy coast were far from being great pictures, but they hinted, as the best war photographs do and as no studio-painting can, at the fathomless actuality of battle.