Art: Security, with Fangs

One day last week 14 little paintings by an unknown named E. Box were hung in London’s Hanover Gallery. By nightfall they were all sold and critics were asking: What does this amateur have that most professionals lack?

The pictures’ quality was not expressed in the way they were painted. E. Box used loud primary colors and plenty of sticky pigment to get a flat, lush, primitive effect. Compared with her, Grandma Moses was an old master. But Box’s subject matter was something special.

The settings of her oils were Edwardian drawing rooms with striped wallpaper and horsehair sofas, and idyllic landscapes with castles and waterfalls. They were peopled, reasonably enough, with whale-boned ladies, poker-faced children and prim nannies, and, less reasonably, with mild-seeming lions, tigers, seals, leopards, lemurs, alligators and bears with nose chains. Animals took the place of men in E. Box’s dream world.

“Box” was a pseudonym. The painter had used it because her life was “just too confused already.” She talked to newsmen last week only after she had exacted solemn promises that her real name would be kept secret.

A sophisticated 40-y ear-old, E. Box had once gone to art school but her art training “never got beyond the point of sitting around a table with a lot of girls, giggling.” She was married at 18 and kept busy thereafter with a baby, a nanny, a cook, a car, a house in London, a cottage in West Sussex, and, for diversion, an occasional visit to an art gallery. Until last year she had never touched a paintbrush in her life.

Her new hobby is a hectic pleasure sandwiched in between her old ones. She spends about a fortnight on each picture, working at odd hours in a spare bedroom, her bracelets jangling and her lace peignoir smeared with paint. It irritates her a bit when friends accuse her of painting in a deliberately “naive” way. “I do my best,” she says earnestly. “I really do!”

The Edwardian settings in her work are easily explained, she thinks. “I used to love looking in mother’s picture album. There was such peace and security then.” As for the animals: “Of course I’m a frightful old English lady about animals. I adore them. My animals are most utterly benign, you know. To me the lion is the coziest creature in the world.”