Tales of the Hoffman House

A fabulous painting which scandalized the '80s was seen in public last week for the first time since 1901. In Manhattan's Durand-Ruel Galleries visitors could look upon Adolphe William Bouguereau's nearly 12-ft. masterpiece, Nymphs and Satyr. A quartet of ripe, naked maidens prancing around a preoccupied faun was for 24 years the despair of Victorian moralists and the delight of the clubmen who crowded Manhattan's Hoffman House bar.

In 1901, after the death of Owner Edward S. Stokes,* the Hoffman House's art treasures (valued around $200,000) were sold. Nymphs and Satyr vanished until last year, when Durand-Ruel Director Herbert H. Elfers stumbled on the legendary canvas in a Manhattan warehouse. Today it is anonymously owned.

Bouguereau's plump-bottomed girls, vainly trying to get their shaggy, Pan-piping friend to romp with them, are depicted in academic, sugary fashion. But the draftsmanship is strong, the painted human flesh masterly. In its time the picture has traveled widely on boxes of Hoffman House perfectos, in a comic lithograph showing a bum leaning on the Hoffman bar, staring at the nymphs by their woodsy creek. The caption: "I've been looking all over the world for that creek, but darned if I can find it."

Legend says that when P. T. Barnum, James Gordon Bennett, Edwin Booth or Colonel Joe ("Gin") Rickey began to brim over at the Hoffman, Bouguereau's girls came to life. In 1934 a smaller Nymphs and Satyr appeared in Trenton, N.J.'s Stacy-Trent Hotel, where novices are told that on the stroke of midnight the picture turns around, reveals the nymphs to better advantage. Robert R. Meyer, owner of the smaller painting, thinks that Bouguereau may have painted a second, but has not proved it.

Considering his 19th-Century fame, the prolific number of paintings he produced, and the fact that he taught French Modernists Georges Rouault and Henri Matisse in their youth, also British Painter Sir John Lavery, astonishingly little is known about Adolphe William Bouguereau. He was born at La Rochelle, France in 1825, clerked in Bordeaux under his father, an olive oil trader, attended Bordeaux's Ecole des Beaux-arts.

Painter Bouguereau went to Paris, won the coveted Prix de Rome in 1850. He was twice married, the second time at 71 to Mrs. Elizabeth Gardner of Exeter, New Hampshire. He fought twice for France, never forgave Germany's Empress- Dowager invited French painters to exhibit in Berlin. Most French painters objected. Bouguereau said: "If I have to go to Berlin alone, I shall go. I consider it a patriotic duty to conquer the German painters in the very capital of German Empire."

In 1905 the 80-year-old artist, brush in hand, died of a heart attack. Last week one Felix Napoleon Gerson of Philadelphia wrote the New York Times that when he attempted one evening in 1883, to stare at the Nymphs and Satyr and use the Hoffman House alcohol cigaret lighter at the same time, the bartender called to him: "Say, young fellow, don't light your nose."

*Famed for his murder in 1872 of his friend Jim Fisk (Jay Gould's partner) after quarrels over bad business and bad, buxom Actress Josie Mansfield. Killer Stokes got off with four years in Sing Sing, emerged to buy control of the Hoffman House.

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