Arts: Ships

Manhattan is waxing nautical. Not that its population shows any immediate tendency to go down to the sea in ships, but the metropolitan eye seems quite definitely cast toward the ocean and the more or less frail craft that sail it. After all, the city on the Hudson is a sea port and it is quite comprehensible that its children should feel a trifle salty at times.

The most conspicuous manifestation of the marine impulse is the growing quantity of little bottled boats in shop windows. There are schooners and brigs, warships and fishing smacks, sailing around and around inside whiskey bottles with an apparent disregard for the relative proportions of the necks of bottles and the heights of masts.

The Belmaison galleries at Wanamaker’s have undertaken the responsi-bility of representing a collection the varied expressions of the marine in Art. There are ship models of all sorts; paintings, prints, watercolors of ships; a carved figurehead; odds and ends reminiscent of shipping.

Most entertaining of all, perhaps, is a set of embroidered pictures in wool. They are reputed to have been made by sailors during the long and weary hours at sea, for the girls they left behind. The themes are all nautical. There is a very interesting decorative quality about these little woolly boats, sailing about the walls.

The October issue of The Arts contains several photographs of the woolly boats on their woolly oceans, giving an excellent idea not only of the naiveté of their treatment but of their high decorative possibilities.