Manhattan gallerygoers were all agog. They read the names Cezanne, Derain, Gaugin, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, all in one announcement. They rushed to the sedate, vermicular-stoned Wildenstein Galleries. There they paid $1 apiece for the benefit of the French Hospital, were permitted last week to maunder through two small rooms hung with 51 modernist French paintings of the first rank. Such a concourse is rare, even among Manhattan opportunities.
Composed entirely of accepted modernist leaders, the exhibition proved that the freakishness of cubism, vorticism, other truculent cults, is quite defunct. There was little that was crude, nothing that was incoherent. Gaugin's bizarre self-portrait seemed to link his face with his own favorite Tahitian fruits; the sardonic humor of the piece was queer but clear. He displayed also a serene Breton landscape, a lovely canvas which could cause no retching among the most conservative. Forain's aphrodisiac The Charleston showed two vibrant white dancers, several paunchy satyr-spectators, was a triumph of contemporary comment. Picasso's The Mother, a suggestion of haggard peasantry, was as successful in another field. There were gusty, sulphurous landscapes by de Vlaminck, fanciful figures in delicately modulated colors by Eugene Zak. The net effect was one of diversified, eclectic appeal. There was much to please, in many manners.
The pictures were loaned by Mr. & Mrs. Cheer Dale of Manhattan. The red-headed Mr. Dale is an investment banker, a member of the Stock Exchange, a director of Western railroads, New Jersey public utilities. During the war he established a Liberty Loan office, sold innumerable bonds. His dynamic existence takes him twice a year to France. He chases over the fairways at St. Cloud, chases to art collectors, buys with zest. With him goes the gracious Mrs. Dale, herself a painter of stage decorations, a writer of cogent art criticism. In three years they have gathered more than 300 modern French paintings, from the glossy classicism of David to the vaporous prettiness of Marie Laurencin.
Blue Eyes
"It is recorded that the color of George Washington's eyes was a light, greyish blue. But when painting his famous portraits of him, Gilbert Stuart made them a deeper blue."
Stuart did so in anticipation of the fading of his paints. Amazingly, his paints did not fade. The fact is recalled by the sedate Boston Transcript, to whose readers a current centennial exhibition of Stuart's portraits is a matter of more than passing interest.
Bostonians were equally interested just after Artist Stuart's death in 1828 when a possibly larger exhibition was held there on behalf of impoverished Mrs. Stuart and her four daughters. Having painted more than a thousand portraits, including the first five Presidents of the U. S. and two
European monarchs, Stuart died almost penniless.
The best known and most significant painter of U. S. portraits lay for many years in an unmarked grave in the old General Central Burying Ground in Boston Common. In 1897 the Paint and Clay Club attached a bronze tablet in the form of a palette.