Athletes & Eggs

Into the great shadowy entry of Princeton's Gothic gymnasium trooped a little group of ardent alumni, exathletes, coaches last week. Pausing beneath faded track-meet banners and beside cabinets of tarnished loving cups, they climbed to the balcony to unveil and inspect a gleaming row of 13 huge murals glorifying Princeton athletics from football to fencing.

Conceived five years ago and made possible as a tribute to Princeton's sport by a group of Princeton sportsmen headed by Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr., the canvases were the work of shy, spectacled William Yarrow, 43, no Princetonian, but a well-known portraitist who divided his time between Dublin, N. H. and Florence, Italy to compose the triumphs of the Orange & the Black. Big, bold figures drawn from undergraduate models with technical advice from coaches and team captains, Artist Yarrow's works depict a relay race in which Princeton has the inside track and a Yale runner has collapsed; a many-muscled Princeton gymnast about to rise straight in the air toward a pair of rings; a crew race on Carnegie Lake in which Harvard's No. 4 is catching a crab; a Princeton swimmer with the enormous feet of his kind; a hockey game suggestive of a ballet; a baseball game in which a Princeton player has obviously just hit a home-run against Yale.

Of more interest to outsiders than the depiction of Princeton's prowess at sports was the fact that Mr. Yarrow had executed his 13 murals in the technique used by the early Renaissance masters--egg-tempera emulsion.

Ever since collectors began noticing how the oil paintings of James Abbott McNeill Whistler have cracked, faded and fallen to pieces in 30 years there has been an ever-increasing interest among serious painters in the chemistry of their craft. Before the Brothers van Eyck popularized the use of oils in the 15th Century, almost all painting was either in fresco (pure pigment mixed with water and applied to wet plaster) or in tempera (ground pigments mixed with beaten egg and water and applied either to wood or canvas that is prepared with a plaster-like ground). Oil painting is easier and quicker, but fresco and tempera do not fade. In Manhattan last week, one of the very few art courses in the U. S. in the technique of egg-tempera painting was under way in the Cooper Union Art School under the direction of David Turnbull, an abstract painter and onetime American Telephone & Telegraph statistician who has studied the technique of egg tempera for six years in Europe and who has collaborated on a book on the subject.

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