Art: Portrait of England

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The second important event of London's social season took place last week with the annual Royal Academy exhibition in Burlington House.* The elderly, well-bred gentlemen who pick the pictures showed in the 1,600 they had chosen that modernists' angry scorn for Royal Academy exhibitions had left them utterly unimpressed.

Last week's opening had little to do with art, a lot to do with England. Star picture was Frank Ernest Beresford's The Princes' Vigil showing the four sons of the late King George V standing guard around his catafalque in the ancient barn of West minster Hall. The artist was chiefly proud of having sketched it so discreetly on his shirt cuffs that no mourner was offended. The high-collared oldster Frank Owens Salisbury drew the greatest crowds with his official portrait of King George at the Silver Jubilee services in St. Paul's last year. He loyally entitled this commonplace job The Heart of the Empire. Others portrayed King George riding, the Duke of York, the Duchess of York, their two little princesses. By royal command there was no portrait of Edward VIII.

King Edward has an absolute veto over pictures chosen for the Royal Academy exhibition, because it is technically his Academy. This year he used his prerogative to extend the deadline for submitting pictures, to oblige Simon Elwes who had painted the official portrait of the Duke of York.

The whole show was a portrait of England. It was full of pictures of substantial English gentlemen like the late Earl Jellicoe, Field Marshal Lord Milne, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Bishop of London, the Right Honorable Leslie Hore-Belisha. It included Battersea Twilight, two pictures of Plymouth Sound, a great number of hunting scenes, the usual Spring in Cornwall, this time by the Academy's first and only full-fledged female member, Laura Knight, Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. It had an extraordinary supply of studies of English bars, the Academician's favorite resource when he wants to get down to life in the raw. Even the nudes were all thoroughly English, blonde, straight, healthy, respectable.

Notable were George Frederick Belcher's humorous paintings. Of his I/ Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls he said last week, "It is a picture of a shabby though very happy gentleman who is obviously a street musician. He is at home, seated at his table. You can see he has been enjoying himself — there are heads and tails of her rings on a plate, a bottle which has contained stout, and a glass which betrays the fact that he has drunk the stout. There is also a half-empty packet of cigarets. The happy gentleman is all alone and he is leaning back in his chair playing his cornet. What is he playing? Well, I've called the picture I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls." The name of the piece is the only thing not made explicitly clear in the picture.

Exception to the rule of painstaking British portraitists is venerable, bearded, cantankerous Augustus Edwin John, 57. He had always ignored the Academy until it elected him in 1921. Britain's most popular eccentric, who dresses like a Paris Bohemian of 1890 and named one of his daughters Poppet, last week exhibited two bold, admirable portraits.