Royal Show

When the citizens of U. S. cities are opening their country places and leaving the sticky streets, the rich citizens of London return to town for a spring of gayeties. The yearly exhibition of paintings at the Royal Academy opens the season. To the Academy's doors came last week lords and ladies, all the best people who live in London, eager to see the pictures and excited at the prospect of saying how-do-you-do to friends they had not seen since the autumn shooting in Scotland. Mrs. Winston Churchill, with three Anglo-Indian ladies, Painter Sir John Lavery with his lady, Margot Asquith, an enormous smile twitching under her hawk nose, Premier Baldwin, in a topper, Ishbel Macdonald with her father, a crowd of college men wearing golf clothes to show their nonchalance, a host of pretty people who bowed to other people who did not know them, went up the stairs and in the door.

There were lots of good paintings, lots of polite portraits, lots of neat landscapes for them to look at. The gay visitors passed these quickly, laughing and talking; then they stopped, suddenly silent, to look at six sorrowful paintings made by a madman.

The madman was Charles Sims, R. A., who once painted King George with spindle legs, who became a lunatic, who committed suicide by jumping in the Tweed river, who left a note asking the Academy to show the last half dozen canvases he had covered (TIME, April 30). Reluctant, the Hanging Committee obeyed. The pictures were silly and terrible; their names had a dark and foolish clamor--My Pain Sheltering Beneath Your Hand, Here Am I. Passing them at last, to look at Sir William Orpen's bitterly melodramatic The Black Cap, or the clever work of 14-year-old Joan Manning Saunders, the smart happy people imitated Premier Baldwin's solemn headshake. "Dreadful . . ." they said, "a shocking thing! . . ."