Art: Lady of the Lake

The girl was a slender French blonde, and only 16. That summer of 1910, when the mornings were warm and clear, she would go down to the shores of Lake Annecy in the French Upper Savoy near Switzerland. With her was a bearded painter from Paris named Paul Chabas. At 8:30 a.m. she would slip out of her clothes and step into the chill water. The first time, she drew her body into an instinctive pose of protection against the cold. “Don’t move!” cried the enchanted painter.

Artist Chabas, an established academician, worked slowly. His sessions lasted only 30 minutes each, and the posing continued for two more summers, until one September morning in 1912 the picture was finally finished. In honor of the day, Chabas called his canvas Matinée de Septembre—”September Morn.” Shown at the

Salon later that year, it won a medal of honor, but caused no public stir, appealed to no collector. Hoping for a buyer, Painter Chabas shipped the picture to the U.S. There the unhoped-for happened. It came to the attention of bewhiskered Anthony Comstock, self-appointed monitor of U.S. morals.

“Lewd & Indecent.” Comstock was strolling down a street in midtown Manhattan one May day in 1913 when the naked blonde vision, displayed in the window of an art gallery, caught his horrified gaze. Storming in, Comstock flashed his police badge and roared: “There’s too little morn and too much maid. Take her out!” The gallery refused. Next day the story was splashed across the front pages of Manhattan’s dailies, and the picture had become famous. Enraged cries of “lewd and indecent” were met with the New York Times’s indignant defense that the picture was as “delicate and innocent as it is beautiful,” while curious crowds blocked the street in front of the gallery.

September Morn went on to become a staple of calendar art, was reproduced on candy boxes, postcards, cigars and suspenders. Purity leagues demanded its suppression. Postcard reproductions of the painting were forbidden the mails. Art dealers were even arrested for handling them. It became the subject of stock gags on the old Keith-Orpheum circuit, and inspired an anonymous couplet that swept the country:

Please do not think I’m bad or bold, But where it’s deep it’s awful cold.

“Exactly Like the Picture.” The picture went back to Painter Chabas in Paris, who sold it to a well-rubied Russian for the equivalent of $10,000. But of all the fortunes made from reproductions of the picture by enterprising entrepreneurs, Chabas once plaintively remarked that “nobody was thoughtful enough to send me even a box of cigars.”

Shortly before World War II, the rumor spread that the frail blonde girl who had trembled for Chabas in the cold water of Lake Annecy was destitute and starving. Chabas stoutly denied it. “She is 41 now,” he said at the time, “and, alas, she is no longer as slender as when she posed for me. She is happily married to a wealthy French industrialist and has three lovely children … I think I succeeded in capturing her delicate charm. She was exactly like the picture …”

Through the Russian Revolution the painting remained in Moscow, then mysteriously disappeared—to turn up later in Paris in the Gulbenkian Collection. By that time the painting had become a part of American folklore, and later generations, who considered the picture (if they considered it at all) about as innocuous as the White Rock girl, wondered what all the shouting had been about. This week they will have a chance to see for themselves. Bought by Philadelphia Main Liner William Coxe Wright, September Morn was presented to Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum. Current market value of the pre-World War I sensation: $30,000.