Art: To Philadelphia

Last week the French Government notified Mayor Kendrick of Philadelphia that certain pictures which he had asked for were being shipped from the Louvre for exhibition at the Sesquicentennial. Very few of the people who will see these pictures displayed on the walls of the exposition buildings are likely to find them unfamiliar; they are pictures that have adorned, in reproduction, millions of book-plates, art calendars, folios, and frontispieces. There is Whistler’s restrained and noble picture of his mother, the old lady folded in silence like the fall of her quiet dress, hearing voices fade, footsteps pass; Millet’s “Angelus,” the bent peasants in their luminous field; the perfumed floridity of Nicholas Poussin’s “Orpheus and Eurydice,” Jacques Louis David’s capable “Portrait of Pius VII”; “Renaul and Armide” one of the classic posturings of François Boucher, the courtier who painted ceilings with the grace of miniatures; and “1814” by Ernest Meissonier, filled with the pomp of banners, stations, mustaches, and death.