Princely Gesture

In the basement of the Victoria & Albert Museum and in the Buddhist Room of the British Museum last week curators and assistants were ripping open boxes and crates, carefully lifting out ancient bits of precious porcelain. Busy with a group of 200 antique Chinese paintings. Orientalist Laurence Binyon prophesied that a 13th Century landscape that he was cataloging will be one of the British Museum's most popular treasures. Keeper of Oriental Antiquities Robert Lockhart Hobson was most excited about a green bronze ram dating from 1200 B. c. and valued at -L-10,000. And there was plenty more: Ming vases. T'ang burial figures, carved jades, Hawthorn jars, gold, bronze and ivory figures, in all about 3,000 pieces bought for Britain this month at a cost of -L-100,000 from a faun-faced elderly Greek named George Eumorfopoulos.

Courtly little George Eumorfopoulos is actually a British subject, born in Liverpool 71 years ago. Until his retirement last August he was vice president of a firm established in London since 1819: Ralli Brothers. Ltd.. private bankers and importers of rape, rice, cotton, hemp from India. The Rallis were of Greek origin, too. Importer Eumorfopoulos lives in London in a handsome house on the Chelsea Embankment, well known to Orientalists all over the world.

With his business interests in the East, George Eumorfopoulos began seriously to collect Oriental art about 30 years ago. Unlike other rich men he employed no dealers, hired no experts, did all his own buying in Paris or London. He likes to show his treasures to strangers. At meetings of collectors' clubs, he often appears lugging in his thin white fingers an ancient dilapidated Gladstone bag. From it he plucks forth odd trinkets worth anywhere up to $50,000 apiece. There never was a burglary at his Chelsea home, nor did the old gentleman ever fear one. All of his pieces are too well known to experts to be of any value to the underworld.

Because Mr. Eumorfopoulos' funds have lately been running a little low, he arranged with the Victoria & Albert and British Museums to buy some of his art collection for half a million dollars. The sale Curator Hobson considered a rare bargain. "It was truly a princely gesture on the part of Mr. Eumorfopoulos," said he last week. "It is impossible to estimate the value of some of the pieces, but the collection might easily amount to -L-500,000." The next great international exhibition at the Royal Academy's Burlington House will be of Chinese art, scheduled for next winter. Collector Eumorfopoulos has agreed to serve on the committee. He will sail for China next month to help choose some of the famed Forbidden City treasures which the Nationalist Govern-ment has offered to lend.

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