The American Prix de Rome is not a horse race but a prize, valued at $8,000, yearly awarded to one U. S. painter and one U. S. sculptor. If he wins the prize, an artist goes to Rome and lives there at the rate of $1,600 a year for three years; his models, tuition and transportation are paid for. Last week, this year's winners were announced; one was Donald M. Mattison, student at the up-and-coming Yale School of Fine Arts, who won the prize for painting. The other was Sculptor David K. Rubins who works in the Manhattan studio of Sculptor James Earle Fraser.
Painter Mattison appeared to be an academician before his time. His was an old-fashioned mythology picture, called Ignis Fatuus. In the painting, there were the nymphs who, according to fable, lured reckless sensation-seekers across the bogs outside of Rome eager to discover the secret of the strange fires that burned upon them. Artist Mattison had included in his composition a man chasing the three false fiery girls. He was clutching at them but his hands were empty, the nymphs were laughing and the man was about to sink down in the bog. The background of the picture was mostly the entrance to a large sewer in which it was possible to distinguish rats jumping around.
Gazers-on were quite naturally surprised that so staid and lugubrious a representation should be the work of a 23-year-old native of Winston-Salem, N. C. With slow words, Donald Mattison explained about his picture. It was not intended as a sermon but only as "a remark upon life in New York."
David Rubins, the 25-year-old prize-winning sculptor, chattered with pleasure when told of his good luck. He said that his father was a Minneapolis mural decorator, that he had learned most about sculpture from his present employer and that he had four years ago won the Beaux Arts Paris Prize, which had already given him one year's study abroad.