Secretary of State Cordell Hull put aside the woes and worries of the London Economic Conference long enough last fortnight to march to Leicester Square and open an art exhibition at swank Leicester Galleries. It was no ordinary exhibit that broke busy Secretary Hull's busy routine, for on display were the latest paintings of his good friend Edward Bruce. But not until Secretary Hull, surrounded by can vases depicting Power. Industry, the Klamath River, the Cascade Mountains and the like, had said a few pleasant nothings did London and the rest of the world wake up to the fact that Artist Bruce was a regular assistant to the U. S. Delegation at the London Conference.
Most famed and applauded of "Businessmen Painters." Artist Bruce retired from active business in 1922 to devote his entire time to his flat decorative landscapes and formal figures. As a painter he is as methodical as he was a lawyer. He works eight hours a day. During the three years they spent together in Anticoli. Italy he drove his artistic mentor, tempera mental Maurice Sterne, to the verge of exhaustion by forcing him to keep the same rigorous hours. Best known Bruce canvas. Panorama of San Francisco, hangs in the San Francisco Stock Exchange. The Luxembourg has another of his landscapes.
But it is not as a landscape painter that Edward Bruce was taken to London with the U. S. Delegation. Onetime associate of the great Manhattan law firm of Cravath. de Gersdorff. Swaine & Wood, he set up an independent practice in the Philippines, bought and operated the Manila Times, was retained by many a U. S. firm, did much business in China. His special knowledge of silver and the monetary problems of the Orient accounted for his official if not his artistic presence in London.