Faces

On Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, horns honked, crowds jostled. Walled from the trespass of honkings, jostlings, in a very still room on that thoroughfare, a courtly company gathered last week. Financiers, famed beauties, serene old ladies. Day faded; lights pricked out along the Avenue. There was no stir, no chatter of departing guests in the still room--the gallery of M. Jacques Seligmann. Women of fashion, men of affairs, all strangely stayed when they should have gone home to dress for dinner. They did not go because they had lent their faces to the Loan Exhibition of the Society of the Art Patrons of America. In one corner stood Otto H. Kahn, international banker--a suave, stocky, domineering head by Sculptor Jo Davidson ; near him, in the twilight, H. P. Davison, a banker no less famed, gazed with measured glance out of the paint of Sir William Orpen. For its economy of drawing, its matchlessly skilful blend of rich sombre hues, this portrait was undoubtedly the masterpiece of the exhibition. Sir William was also represented by his portrait of Mr. Goadby Loew, a lean, commanding gentleman folding wiry arms over a double-breasted blue waistcoat. There too was Anna Pavlowa by Malvina Hoffman; almost too slinky, too shiny-eyed a lady for that decorous dusk; Schattenstein's picture of Miss Cathleen Vanderbilt (Mrs. Harry C. Cushing III), oval face, narrow eyes, pursed sleepy mouth; Halmi's portrait of Miss Constance Mc-Cann, a slim girl with red hair; Alfred Munnings' restrained, academical paintings of Mrs. George F. Baker Jr., Mr. Sidney Fish. There was an early Sargent; an early Augustus John.