Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 285, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 December 1915 — What Art Students in New York’s Museum Hear [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

What Art Students in New York’s Museum Hear

NEW YORK. —The students of painting who copy the Rembrandts and other paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art are bothered considerably by conversational critics, who get close to their easel and comment on the

work before them. One of the girl students was chatting about some of the phases of that kind of practice. “Some if the museum visitors,’' she said, “take it for granted that the copyists are stqne deaf. One afternoon about a month ago a mastodonic woman with her three mammoth pigtailed daughters drew up behind my easel, standing so close to me that I could barely move my arms without brushing against one or the other of

them. I was copying a Rembrandt ‘Portrait of a Gentleman.’ One side of the face is heavily shaded, so much so that the eye is barely visible. It was upon thiß eye that I was engaged when the huge woman said! * Well, Ido declare, if that looney girl bain t givin’ that poor fellow a black eye.’ And all four of them tittered in unison. Not long after that an elderly couple, evidently from the country, came up behind my easel. ’Land sakes, Hiram, hain’t that pore gal thin?' said the woman. ‘She sure is,’ Hiram replied, musingly. ‘But I’ve often heerd that these yere artist gals mosUy starve while they’re gittin’ their picter painting eddication.’ The woman nudged her husband and whispered something*. Then she opened a nice, clean package and took from it a large, comfortablelooking corned beef sandwich, made with homemade bread. ‘You pore chil’, you look most famished,’ she said, as she offered me the sandwich. Did I accept it? Well, I should say I did, and ate it, too. And maybe it wasn’t good. They asied me a lot of naive questions about my work and invited me to spend the summer with them.”