THE MONEY IN ART

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 7, 10 January 1938, Page 7

THE MONEY IN ART

DE LASZLO'S INCOME

PORTRAIT PAINTERS LEAD

Mr. Philip de Laszlo, who has died recently, is reputed to have made £20,000 a year from his portraits, writes Pierre Jeannerat in the "Daily Mail." Mothers who notice their little Tommy's vivacious sketches with coloured chalks probably have visions of the golden gates of mercenary success opening before him.' There is money in art, a very' great deal of money, and not only for the sellers of £160,000 Old Masters, like Gainsborough's "Blue Boy," which went to America. The obscure cohorts of art students and daubers who fill the attics of Chelsea Montparnasse, Greenwich Village in New York, and the arty quarters of Munich, Vienna, and Rome, are regularly cheered by the spectacle of one of their erstwhile members flashing to worldly fame. De Laszlo in his heyday charged 2000 guineas for a full-length; Brockhurst, the latest R.A., places a price of more than £1000 on his painted heads; Augustus John belongs to the same exalted company and so in the' recent past did Orpen and Sargent. One characteristic belongs to all these otherwise different men. They are all portrait painters. Oh, Vanity! Vanity, prime mover of nine-tenths of human actions! MUCH SOUGHT AFTER. What pretty woman does not look complacently in her mirror? What strong man does not take pride in the protuberance of his chin? What comparative nobody does not cherish the belief that some peculiar detail of his facial make-up, if not the whole (a white wisp of hair like Whistler's, it may be; or even assertive warts like Cromwell's), is deserving of immortality? And so we find that the portraitpainter, fondly imagined to be a recorder for all time, is the most soughtafter of painters. To him belongs the incense of society's adulation and thanks, and at his door, as it was said of Sargent's, do countesses and duchesses queue'up, athirst for1 the age-long glamour that enshrines a Mona Lisa in posterity's heart. Mind you, there are thousands;, of painters who are thankful enougH:if they get £20 for a portrait, painters quite capable,of catching a good likeness and even of adding the sitter's pet poodle. .:. The cream of the market goes .only to the exceptional portraitist who lends rare distinction to every stroke of Jlis brush. -.' Sargent gave a shining veneer, of ancient aristocracy to almost any individual prepared to pay for it, and de Laszlo could make quite plain moderns worthy of hanging in the ancestral gallery next to beauties painted by Reynolds or Romney. Sargent was not the equal of a Velasquez, and de Laszlo by no means the equal of Romney, but their styles were near enough to the style ofI;the great forbears to satisfy patrons, y WORKING ELSEWHERE. Men of genius who did not poss.ess the same facility for imparting glamour to the belles of the day (Manet, for instance, who would dearly have loved to become a society portraitist) have had to work in other channels. ;t Historical painting, now neglected, once fed its votaries, figuratively speaking, not on bread and butter but on caviare. ■■;' W. C. Orchardson received £2000 for his popular "Napoleon on • Board the Bellerophon." And landscape painting is still well able to look after its man. '■■'■ A craze for a particular form of art sometimes brings amazing rewards" to fortunate individuals. Shortly after the war collecting etchings became .-the fashion for a number of wealthy connoisseurs. D. Y. Cameron and James Mcßey saw prints of theirs fetch-hun-dreds of pounds each, and it is a'Sad. reflection that the greatest etcher since Rembrandt, the half-French, halfEnglish Meryon, died a pauper in a lunatic asylum. . In fact, monetary success, although it rightly alighted on a number?of towering artists such as Raphael and Rubens and Titian, never has been and never will be a criterion •; of aesthetic worth. Van Gough, wbbse canvasses nowadays change hands for tens of thousands of pounds, sold only one picture, and that for a few hundred francs, while alive. Seurat, whose "Circus" was insured for £40,000 when recently exhibited in London, was equally spurned by fortune: The reward for such as these consists of the excitement of creativeness. . ; . Art is a gamble. Mother's ' little Tommy may after all turn put lucky.

TREASURE OF LIMA"

FOUND AT QUEENSCLIFF?

In a cave the size of a small room, which has been discovered at the bottom of a s&ft shaft sunk down through a cliff at Queenscliff, a syndicate, comprising two men from Daylesford and two from Geelong, believe they have located the hiding-place of the treasure of Lima—two solid gold, life-size images, gold ,and jewels valued at £13,000,000, says the "Sydney Morning Herald."

For three weeks a diver had been working in the water-filled cave, his work hampered by quicksands and^oy the danger of subsidence. Now the syndicate, which has conducted tfie search for seven months, has closed the shaft. It is understood that the work cannot be continued until powerful submarine lights are obtained. -So far, in the dark, opaque water, 'the diver has been working by sens.e'/of touch only

The site of the search is on railway property, on the edge of the town, and the grass-covered cliff into which .the shaft has been sunk is only about twenty yards back from the railway line. The discovery of the cave \V_as regarded by the syndicate as a thrilling substantiation of their beliefs. One of them is a "diviner," and by testing the top of the cliff with a metal divining lathe, he said that the sinking jbf a shaft would reveal a cave; It didr _ The cave was also a basis for optimism, because it fitted in with', the story of the treasure. It is a historical fact that gold and jewels were pliliidered from the churches and treasiify of Lima, Peru, towards the end of i&e eighteenth century. There is also cvi« dence suggesting that, when it was carried off by the Spanish pirate, Benito Bonito, portion of it may have been brought to the shores of Queenscliff in 1798. The story is that Bonilo was surprised by a British man-o'-war when hiding it, and blew up the cave in which it had been placed.

The diviner who indicated the existence of the cave also traced out the outline of the crude feet and lower legs of an image on the sand on lop of the cliff. The outline was made by marking the spots where the pull on the divining-rod began and ended. .