Art: President's Picture Book

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The brief and not very glorious annals of the Mexican War (1846-48) include certain quaintly sketchy chapters on U. S. naval operations in California. Men-of-war from England, France, Russia and the U. S. had been tacking along that beautiful coast for years, itching to hoist—and occasionally hoisting—their flags in nominally Mexican territory. At the outbreak of war the U. S. Government sent Commodore Robert Field Stockton, a fire-eating officer from Princeton, N. J., to reinforce the Pacific squadron. Mexican ports were blockaded, Mexican ships burned, Mexican towns bombarded. In several engagements Commodore Stockton's seamen beat Mexican troops all hollow.

No official photographers went along on this conquest of the Empire of the West. But on the sloop Dale there was one William H. Meyers, a gunner who had been recommended as a "good seaman, a good Navigator and of moral worth." Gunner Meyers also had the recorder's instinct. His 28 watercolor drawings, virtually the only pictorial record of the war in California, are a favorite possession of Navy-lover Franklin D. Roosevelt. In one of them, Bombardment of Guaymas (see cut). Artist Meyers showed himself firing the middle gun.

Because they are full of martial naïveté, doll-like action and nicely faded coloring, these pictures delight shrewd, big-boyish Manhattan Publisher Bennet A. Cerf, who last year published The Public Papers & Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Last week Publisher Cerf announced that his Random House will publish the Meyers drawings this year, with an introduction by Mr. Roosevelt—a Presidential picture book in a limited edition of 1,000 copies at $25.