Saddle & Sirloin

Chicago's Saddle & Sirloin Club, famed hangout of U.S. meatpacking executives, got a notable gift last week. The gift: the 1 1/2 by 3 ft. original sketch of Rosa Bonheur's nobly galumphing Horse Fair. The donor: doggy Mrs. M. Hartley Dodge, niece of John D. Rockefeller Sr.

The Saddle & Sirloin is a luncheon club whose members still enjoy the best that the war has left them of their club's world-famed steaks. The club also owns the world's greatest collection of meat tycoons' portraits. On its somber, paneled walls hang some 240 sumptuously framed, vigorously extroverted, mostly three-quarter-length portraits of the biggest breeders, killers, packers, meat sellers in the history of U.S. beef.

Bristles, Blood and Bones. There is Philip Danforth Armour, burnsided, frock-coated and wing-collared, an impassioned believer in human perfectibility who is supposed to have said: "I like to turn bristles, blood, bones and the insides and outsides of pigs and bullocks into revenue now, for I can turn the revenue into these boys and girls [who were supported by Armour funds], and they will go on forever." There is curly-haired, German-Jewish Nelson Morris, who got his start by investing his savings in pigs whose legs had been broken in transit and who is supposed to have the best cattle-buyer's eye in history. This is hotly disputed by admirers of Gustavus Franklin Swift, who is also prominently hung. There are gentler people like Wisconsin University's goateed Dr. Stephen Moulton Babcock, to whom dairymen are forever grateful. He refused patents or profit on his butterfat-measuring Babcock Test. There is Herbert Hoover; he was hung for his veto of legislation which would have hurt livestock men.

On other walls portraits of distinguished cattle share honors with the cattlemen. Among them: the Duke of Northumberland, "the best Shorthorn bull in all England in 1839"; a charming oil of a Guernsey cow with dainty pink nostrils and eyelids. There is a two-foot bronze sculpture of a Belgian horse by Rosa Bonheur's gifted brother, Isadore.

100 Portraits and Death. The Saddle & Sirloin Club was founded in 1901, to extend recognition to men who had made outstanding contributions to the livestock industry. Recognition, the founders decided, should take the form of a portrait of each member. The original portrait artist was James R. Stuart. He was followed by Arvid Nieholm. Most of their portraits were destroyed in the stockyards fire of 1934, and Robert Grafton was commissioned to redo the lost canvases. After completing 100 portraits in two years, Artist Grafton dropped dead. Saddle & Sirloin's current portraitist is Othmar Hoffler. He has been at it for seven years.

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