For Pleasure

Jean de Botton is the only French painter accredited by the British Government to paint the Coronation ceremony inside Westminster Abbey (by request of the Duke of Gloucester). Yet when a friend took twelve of his bright canvases around to Manhattan's Harriman Gallery, the dealers knew next to nothing about him. After looking at the pictures, however, they decided promptly to hang them, did so this week.

Jean de Botton is the bellwether of a small group of French painters who confess that the chief aim of their art is to give pleasure. They disavow both literal story-telling and the abstractionism of painters who paint to please themselves.

They aim to give pleasure by a "synthesis of life"--achieved in straightforward pictorial form by force of imagination.

British critics have credited them with good taste, French critics with pictorial tact.

The twelve pictures in de Botton's first one-man show in the U. S. are notable for sinewy, flexible composition and color, a sort of high-spirited withdrawal from both cynicism and enthusiasm. Some of the small figures are minutely painted but faces seem to bore him; they are indicated by a few haphazard strokes, or simply by highlights on forehead and chin.

There are three hunting scenes, four nudes, two representations of square-rigged ships. Dream of a Child is a Santa Claus and horses vaguely limned in pink highlights. In Three-Masted Schooner, green and bronze hues on the sails seem to reflect light from both shore and sea. Most striking of the nudes depicts an olive-skinned brunette and a rosy blonde reclining in affectionate languor on a couch, the pink sands of the Mediterranean gleaming through a window, a pink curtain blowing across a table, a statuet of a man on a pedestal in the background.

Jean de Botton was born in Royan 37 years ago, of a French father, an English mother. His parents tried to make him a diplomat but Jean, already a worshiper of Tintoretto, Mantegna and El Greco, stood them off, earned a living doing posters and sketches of furniture. He first won general notice in 1927 with Nu an trois-mats (nude and three-masted ship). Of another picture, Leda, a critic said that it delivered the kick in the stomach characteristic of genius. De Botton's portrait of Author Jules Remains (Men of Good Will), his onetime philosophy teacher, was bought by the French Government.

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