Art: Roll Call in Newport

If there is one town north of the Mason and Dixon that makes an art of looking backward, it is the venerable stronghold of entrenched society, Newport, R. I.

Last week, scions of families known the world over, had an opportunity to preen their feathers at Newport Art Association's Gushing Memorial Gallery. There, an eminently back-scratching collection of family portraits, paintings, historic prints and photographs was gathered to celebrate the town's 300th birthday. The gallery's walls bore a stupendous weight of 19th-Century socialites, intellectuals, artists; 18th-Century pirates, privateers, naval heroes; 16th-Century divines. And among them hung paintings of the Colonial churches, including Trinity's Christopher Wrenish spire by one of Newport's best known resident artists, Helena Sturtevant.

Chief pillar of the Golden Age was wealth, not piety, and chief source of this wealth the lucrative trade-triangle—West Indian molasses, Newport rum, African slaves. Result: one of the largest groups of private mansions in New England. Through these fine houses from the Revolution to the present have passed nearly all the famed social arbiters and artists of U. S. history. Rev. Thomas Skinner sat for Telegraph Inventor-Painter Samuel F. B. Morse; National Academy President Daniel Huntington painted Bishop Henry C. Potter; Alexander James did Admiral Stephen B. Luce, who inaugurated modern naval training; George Peter Alexander Healy produced a famous likeness of Mrs. August Belmont. While John Singer Sargent had a whack at several bigwigs of a later day, and contemporary painters filled in the gaps.

Last week they all answered present in Newport's tercentenary roll call.