Arts: International Exhibition

Homer Saint-Gaudens, Director of Fine Arts at Carnegie Institute, announced the decision of the six judges sitting on the jury of awards for the Institute’s International Exhibition. The jury members were: Pierre Bonnard of Paris, Giovanni Romagnoli of Bologna, Charles Sims of London, and three U. S. artists: Charles W. Hawthorne, Howard Giles and Gifford Beal. It is amazing what a lot of thunder the Institute is able to stir up every year over the award of a first prize of $1,500, a second of $1,000, and a third of $500. But even if the amounts were not, perhaps, sumptuous, they were very gratefully received by Ferruccio Ferrazzi, K. X. Roussel, and Robert Spencer, an American.

Artist Spencer, though a Harvard man, never cared for Boston. He was born in Harvard, Neb., lives now in New Hope, Pa., has studied under Chase and Henri, is a member of the National Academy. His picture “Mountebanks and Thieves” depicts U. S. slum life with its gay devil-may-care foreground, and the gaunt bleak tenements, brooding, relentless in the background.

Critics wondered whether the judges had not given Artist Spencer the prize because they thought an American ought to have such financial assistance. Nor would a jury of critics ever have given first place to Ferrazzi’s “Horatia and Fabiola”; they would have chosen the obvious and imposing qualities of Mrs. Ernest Prostor’s “The Back Bedroom.” You can only see a corner of the bedroom. A girl with a primitive face and a fine supple body leans over the back of a chair. The skin has texture; the pose understanding; but over it all, the simplicity, the strong drive of the light into the picture, is something too glib, a derived accent. A jury of critics would have chosen it; the Carnegie’s jury of painters gave it only an honorable mention, as they gave Antoine Faistauer’s exceedingly competent “Old Village, Menton” and John Carroll’s pretty illustration “Man With Guitar.” (Would it, one critic demanded, have been too laborious to call this picture “A Man With a Guitar”?) Only a jury of painters would have discerned the subtlety of Ferrazzi’s tall Italian woman, by far the best picture in the exhibition, which by an odd chance received first prize. From what tall church window did she steal the gown she wore the morning Ferrazzi thought of her, standing beside an open door? The woman, leading a baby girl, is about to go from one room into another. She is a woman of this age. Yet you have a feeling that in the room to which, next moment, she will go, Fra Lippo Lippi is eating toasted chestnuts and cursing genially because his model is late.

Stamps

Hundreds of thousands of silly little pieces of paper, oblong, square, three-cornered, printed in faded colors, smudged with ink marks, none of them bigger than a square inch or so, none of them very beautiful, and none of them the least use in the world. Such rubbish, said a woman with an umbrella, eyeing disdainfully a red and black oblong all by itself in a glass case ten times too large for it, such rubbish might as well be burned, and better. She turned away and, crossing a large white granite hall, found a taxi that would take her away as quickly as possible from the Grand Central Palace, Manhattan, and the International Collection of Postage Stamps which opened there last week.

If, in answer to the woman’s thought, all the assembled stamps had been thrown into a fire, the conflagration would not have been great, but the resultant damage would have been in excess of 20 million dollars. Famed collectors everywhere had sent their collections; the President of the exhibition himself, Charles Lathrop Pack, beady-eyed and white-mustachioed, exhibited his fine group of early Victoria stamps (limited to the issues with the half-length and enthroned portraits of the Queen), a collection which formed the basis for a monograph which won a gold medal for philatelic research at a London exhibition.

Twenty-four judges worked to pick the championship and gold medal collections. Never before in the world’s history had such a collection of expert philatelists assembled in one room. Prince Otto of Hungary, exiled in Spain, sent his collection. General F. Hegeman-Lindencrone of Copenhagen, 85, who specializes in Nordic stamps, stamps on the original envelopes, and the postal issues of Schleswig and Holstein, sent 2,000 of his rarest pieces. U. S. Postmaster General Harry S. New sent a government exhibition and put on sale (twelve days earlier than he had meant to) a new two-cent stamp to commemorate the Battle of White Plains. Colonel E. H. R. Green (son of the late Hetty Green), Charles N. Ams (whose collection of Gambia stamps is second to no other collection of Gambia stamps), Alfred F. Lichtenstein, Swiss stamp collector, Miss Ellen F. Nason of Claremont, N. H., collector of Arabian stamps, with all the special issues for Jeddah and Nejd —these and many more sent their best. But one and all, when they beheld a black and magenta stamp lying by itself in a case ten times too big for it, bowed in reverence. This stamp bears upon its breast in bold letters the words “One Cent.” Its owner, Arthur Hind, of Utica, paid $32,500 for it. It is the most valuable stamp in the world. Should some one find, on an old letter, a big stamp with an octagon marked within its four corners, and a square inside the octagon, and in the square a schooner, full-rigged, with “British” in the sky above it and “Guiana” in the sea beneath, then the value of Mr. Hind’s stamp would be lessened, for collectors would know that there were two such stamps in the world.

Once this famed stamp, the “British Guiana 1856” belonged to Philippe la Rénotière von Ferrari, an odd curmudgeon whose collection was bought by Mr. Hind (textiles). Count Ferrari lived in a castle at 57 Rue de Varennes, Paris, which his mother had willed to the Austrian Embassy in order that her son might live under the Austrian flag. In that gaunt house Von Ferrari kept the only copy of the Boscawen (N. H.) stamp, the Lockport (N. Y.) stamp, and one of the Hawaiian “missionary”* stamps. These Mr. Hind, now admittedly the world’s foremost collector, bought for $12,000, $8,500 and $14,500 respectively.

Near the stamps of Collector Hind the lights of the Grand Central Palace shone on a stamp with George Washington’s face on it (an old New York issue, one of the rarest stamps in the world); the “St. Louis” 20-cent stamp with two bears holding a shield; the one-franc tête bêche stamps (printed upside down); the freak inverted 24-cent U. S. airplane stamps (only one sheet of them got into circulation) and many another scrap of paper that it would be bad luck to throw away if found on some old letters in the attic.

Negro Models

The more staid of subscribers carped; others acquiesced. Last week, in London, Artist Frank Brangwyn continued with his plans, imperturbed. From a U. S. revue appearing at the London Pavilion, he selected Negro show girls as the models for the panels he is designing for the War memorial of the House of Lords in the Royal Gallery. The sheen of ebony figures will appear on the panel representing the Maltese Islands in the series called the “Pageant of the Empire,” which show the various racial types. Carpers were alarmed by suspicions of fierce negroid heads, gleaming black torsos, black limbs in primitive attitudes.

*So called because the only existing copies are those taken from the letters which the first missionaries in the Sandwich Islands (cannibal) wrote to their relatives at home.