Portrait of England

The second important event of London's social season took place last week with the annual Royal Academy exhibition in Burlington House.* The elderly, well-bred gentlemen who pick the pictures showed in the 1,600 they had chosen that modernists' angry scorn for Royal Academy exhibitions had left them utterly unimpressed.

Last week's opening had little to do with art, a lot to do with England. Star picture was Frank Ernest Beresford's The Princes' Vigil showing the four sons of the late King George V standing guard around his catafalque in the ancient barn of West minster Hall. The artist was chiefly proud of having sketched it so discreetly on his shirt cuffs that no mourner was offended. The high-collared oldster Frank Owens Salisbury drew the greatest crowds with his official portrait of King George at the Silver Jubilee services in St. Paul's last year. He loyally entitled this commonplace job The Heart of the Empire. Others portrayed King George riding, the Duke of York, the Duchess of York, their two little princesses. By royal command there was no portrait of Edward VIII.

King Edward has an absolute veto over pictures chosen for the Royal Academy exhibition, because it is technically his Academy. This year he used his prerogative to extend the deadline for submitting pictures, to oblige Simon Elwes who had painted the official portrait of the Duke of York.

The whole show was a portrait of England. It was full of pictures of substantial English gentlemen like the late Earl Jellicoe, Field Marshal Lord Milne, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Bishop of London, the Right Honorable Leslie Hore-Belisha. It included Battersea Twilight, two pictures of Plymouth Sound, a great number of hunting scenes, the usual Spring in Cornwall, this time by the Academy's first and only full-fledged female member, Laura Knight, Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. It had an extraordinary supply of studies of English bars, the Academician's favorite resource when he wants to get down to life in the raw. Even the nudes were all thoroughly English, blonde, straight, healthy, respectable.

Notable were George Frederick Belcher's humorous paintings. Of his I/ Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls he said last week, "It is a picture of a shabby though very happy gentleman who is obviously a street musician. He is at home, seated at his table. You can see he has been enjoying himself -- there are heads and tails of her rings on a plate, a bottle which has contained stout, and a glass which betrays the fact that he has drunk the stout. There is also a half-empty packet of cigarets. The happy gentleman is all alone and he is leaning back in his chair playing his cornet. What is he playing? Well, I've called the picture I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls." The name of the piece is the only thing not made explicitly clear in the picture.

Exception to the rule of painstaking British portraitists is venerable, bearded, cantankerous Augustus Edwin John, 57. He had always ignored the Academy until it elected him in 1921. Britain's most popular eccentric, who dresses like a Paris Bohemian of 1890 and named one of his daughters Poppet, last week exhibited two bold, admirable portraits.

Popular were Dame Laura Knight's studies of ballet girls and a circus scene. Of the ballet girls the London Times proudly said, "Right in size, graceful in movement and subtle in tone, with just the difference from Degas to bespeak an English and a feminine vision."

Minor suspense developed before the opening over whether Academician Gerald Festus Kelly would submit the customary portrait of his wife, Jane. Three years ago he broke off the series of Janes because they had become an Academy joke, promised this year to prove his versatility by submitting a portrait of Eton's provost, Dr. Montague Rhodes James. Dr. James fell ill and Artist Kelly ended by submitting another Jane, this time in a blue 18th Century gown.

Of Thomas Cantrell Dugdale's portrait of Actress Vivien Leigh in bed, the Royal Academy's pressagent thought it necessary to explain that the artist, calling to arrange sittings, had found Miss Leigh ill in bed, decided to do her that way, in a sheer blue nightgown. Only ''challenge to orthodoxy'' in the show was a double portrait of another actress lying on a couch in her unmarried personality, leaning over the couch in her married personality.

Clouded in secrecy are the sessions of the Academy's Hanging Committee, which meets behind a screen, looks at the pictures and sculptures held up by aproned "carpenters" and indicates to the chairman whether to hold up the cardboard letter X for Rejected, A for Accepted or D for Doubtful. The carpenter thereupon marks the indicated letter on the back of the canvas or the bottom of the sculpture. All entries are then voted on by a council of Academicians. Rejected entrants are notified to call for their work. Accepted entrants are asked to appear at Burlington House for the socialite "Varnishing Day" two days before the public opening.

This year's Hanging Committee, who tried hard to remain anonymous, were Dame Laura Knight's husband, Professor Harold Knight, who accepted three of his own portraits, including one of Laurence Olivier as Romeo; Sculptor Sir William Reid Dick, who accepted a model of his own giant statue of the Earl of Willingdon; Alfred J. Munnings, who accepted his own portrait of the Master of the Essex Union and five others. Their only pay for their three-month job was a daily lunch at Burlington House. Academicians were permitted to submit six pictures, outsiders three.

The Committee was confronted with 11,000 pictures, most of them bigger than usual, a great number of industrial and allegorical subjects and surprisingly few landscapes. Academicians blamed the dearth of landscapes on the past year's bad British weather which kept painters indoors.

The Academy was last week spared such a ruckus as marked last year's show. Then, for the first time in history, an Associate Member of the Academy, woolly-haired Stanley Spencer, 43, got mad because the Hanging Committee had rejected his St. Francis and the Birds, showing a fat man in a barnyard, and The Lovers, showing a woman carrying an elderly man in her arms. He demanded the return of three other canvases which the Committee had accepted. When the Committee refused to return them, Stanley Spencer resigned from the Academy.

The Royal Academy show is most painstakingly reviewed each year by London's sartorial trade sheet, Tailor and Cutter, which last week gloomed over Sir William Rothenstein's slovenliness in painting a portrait of himself wearing a waistcoat buttoning the wrong way.

* The first: opening of the opera season at Covent Garden at the end of April.

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