Art: Home Museum

Thanks to the radio, an ordinary man can listen to great music in slippered ease. But to see great art he must risk fallen arches tramping through museums. To bring good painting to the family circle, many a low-priced art book, crammed with color reproductions, has lately been published in the U. S. (TIME, Oct. 23). Another venture in the way of such home museums was put out last week by William H. Wise & Co.

Sure to hit popular taste amidships was World-Famous Paintings, based on questionnaires to 31,000 Wise customers asking for their favorite paintings. For $2.95 the reader got the 100 most popular choices in color, a running-fire commentary by Artist Rockwell Kent. Unprecedentedly huge was the first edition of 300,000 copies. With 220,000 of them sold already, Wise & Co. planned another printing of 250,000 in January.

World-Famous Paintings needed 250,000 gallons of milk (for casein) to make the coated paper on which it is printed. Some of its time-tried favorites: The Last Supper, Mona Lisa, The Birth of Venus, The Laughing Cavalier, Shoeing the Baby Mare, The Angelus, Mrs. Siddons, The Music Lesson, The Blue Boy, Whistler's Mother. Editor Kent was allowed no say in deciding which pictures were to be used. Says he: "Had the selection of pictures been left to me it would have come to include many that are now in the volume. And with what vindictive fury would it have excluded others!" But even readers who sympathize with him are likely to think that Wise & Co.'s milk was well spilt.