Something for the Rumpus Room

Like the luscious nude over the barroom mirror, or Mother Goose in the nursery, the bright prints of pink-coated foxhunters have become the standard pictures for thousands of U.S. libraries, dens and rumpus rooms. Richard Gump, the iconoclastic, 44-year-old president of Gump's famed art store in San Francisco, thinks that's a shame. "Why not baseball or football pictures?" he asks. "Those frozen hunting prints have become purely functional, like door knobs. Pictures mean nothing unless they make sense to the man who looks at them."

Last week Gump's put 250 sporting prints, drawings, sculptures and paintings on exhibition to prove that rumpus-room art can make sense to contemporary U.S. citizens. The show went back three centuries, included an engraving of the Duke of York (later King James II) playing tennis. There were paintings and prints of boxing, football, baseball, hockey, skiing and golf--and an early 19th Century engraving, Playing at Bomble Puppy.*

As John Steuart Curry's powder-puff oil, Hitting the Line, showed, football is a mighty hard sport to picture convincingly. Prizefighting, where the action is limited to two men under brilliant light, does better, and the best painting in the show was George Bellows' classic one of Firpo knocking Dempsey through the ropes. Nineteenth Century standouts were engravings of the great Australian heavyweight, Peter Jackson, and of a bearded speedster named William Howitt.

Nearly 500 people a day swarmed through the exhibition, which was already turning out to be the most popular in Gump's 91-year history. The first pictures to go were an 18th Century engraving of two cupids making a prim stab at golf, and four Victorian prints celebrating croquet, bathing, archery and rowing. Beamed Impresario Gump: "We've taken sporting art out of the box seats and moved it into the bleachers."

*A game in which the players take turns bowling small metal balls at nine numbered holes.

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