Halifax Gentleman

In the Nova Scotia Museum of Fine Arts in Halifax, an impressive array of notables assembled one day last week for a special ceremony: the presentation of two 17th century landscapes attributed to the Italian artist Salvator Rosa. What brought out the notables was not so much the Rosas as their roundabout arrival.

The story of the Rosas goes back to a day in the War of 1812, when the good ship Marquis de Somerueles, flying the American flag, was bowling westward over the Atlantic and ran into trouble in the form of a British man-o'-war. The Somerueles and her cargo, including crates of Italian art for Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, were hauled off to Halifax as prizes of war.

The little academy was stunned by the news. In desperation, its directors decided to petition Halifax to send the paintings back. "Knowing," said the directors, "that even war does not leave science and art unprotected, and that Britons have often considered themselves at peace with these, we are not without hopes of seeing them . . ." In Halifax, Vice-Admiralty Justice Sir Alexander Croke made Philadelphia a gentlemanly, periwigged bow. "Heaven forbid," he said, "that such an application to the generosity of Great Britain should ever be ineffectual." After a learned recital of the laws of war, Sir Alexander concluded with a full flourish: "With real sensations of pleasure . . . I decree the restitution of the property . . ." Halifax sent the paintings to Philadelphia by truce ship.

In time, Sir Alexander's decision became a precedent in international law. But the academy itself gradually forgot its own part in it. It was not until 1948, when the arts and monuments officer of the State Department tried to track down the text of the academy petition, that the whole incident came to mind again. The academy decided that it was time to make a gesture of its own.

By last November negotiations were completed, and last week the story came to an end. Most of the paintings in the 1812 shipment seemed to have been lost in the bad academy fire of 1845, but the academy still had three Rosas which, it believed, had been part of that shipment. It turned two of the three over to Halifax "with real sensations of pleasure."

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