• U.S.

Art: Brush v. Brooks-Aten

4 minute read
TIME

Dilemma: A lady has her portrait painted. When the portrait is finished, she pays the artist his fee, say $10,000. But, since she feels that he has not done justice to her appearance, the lady allows the artist to take back the picture for improvement. Having “improved” it, the artist returns the painting—together with his bill for, say, $7,000. Should the lady pay the bill or allow the artist to sue?

When this dilemma presented itself to Mrs. Florence Brooks-Aten of Manhattan she decided not to pay the bill. Painter George de Forest Brush promptly sued. The case was called for the third time in Manhattan last week. Mrs. Brooks-Aten displayed her matronly face to the jury, produced testimony that the portrait gave her shoe-button eyes, that her figure had been made to look like that of a “stuffed doll.” These mishaps, however lamentable if true, did not concern the jury, which was faced with deciding whether or not, after paying Painter Brush for the finished portrait, Mrs. Brooks-Aten had entered upon a new and separate contract in returning the picture to him for changes. The jury decided that she had so done. They awarded Painter Brush $1,750 of his claim for $7,000.

After the first trial, Painter Brush was awarded a verdict of $4,000. The second was a mistrial, and after the third Mrs. Brooks-Aten announced that she would appeal the case first to the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court and later, if necessary, to the Court of Appeals (highest court in New York).

Since Painter Brush is already 74 years old, it is unlikely that he will collect any money from Mrs. Brooks-Aten. No foxy sycophant tricking unwary ladies with oiled flatteries for which they can ill afford to pay, Artist Brush had better things to do last week than to gloat upon the precedent his suit had established or to bewail the obdurateness of Mrs. Brooks-Aten. It was the second week of his first comprehensive public exhibition at the Grand Central Art Galleries, Manhattan.

A painter who brought the elegant line of his French masters to early studies of American Indians, Painter Brush first became famed in the 1880’s. Since the turn of the Century he has devoted himself to portraiture and figure groups, often using for models the members of his numerous family. Possibly the most noteworthy, certainly the most celebrated, of his 47 paintings which hung at the Grand Central last week was Mourning Her Brave: the figure of a squaw, standing in snow at the edge of a cliff. Birds circle in the grey sky over her head, the snow stretches upward behind her over rocks, she raises her wide shoe-button eyes into a sky that is empty of all things except snow.

The other canvases exhibited the wide range of methods, the diverse schools which Painter Brush has dabbled in in Paris under Gerome, in Florence, in the U. S. Far West, in New Hampshire. Twelve were portraits of mothers and children; grave, almost severe blonde ladies clasping infants in whose dimpled countenances no inherited austerity was yet apparent. There were also children alone, their small faces made charming by the possession of some perennial secret; and there was the picture of an Indian in his canoe on a dark river, who stared through a subaqueous gloom of trees at a bird, moving above him on white, tremendous wings. In all these canvases was the sure, lucid draughtsmanship which is Painter Brush’s most notable talent and which explains, more than any other characteristic, the presence of his paintings in five important U. S. museums.

Now, at 74, Artist Brush is still too courteous to become much exercised over the accusations of dissatisfied patrons. He lives in a farmhouse at Dublin, N. H., but is wintering at Oyster Bay, L. I. His eight children, of whom three have died, grew up in the West while Artist Brush was painting Indians. They learned to pose before they learned to read and received little formal schooling. His four girls are now married; one to a Cabot, one to a Coates, one to a Bowditch, one to Inventor Winslow Pierce Jr.

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