Psalter & Olive Branch

Brother John Tikytt (or Tikyll), Prior of the Augustinian Monastery of Wyrkesopp, England, was engaged, about the year 1310, in limning a psalter. He finished 90 pages, with elaborate titles in gold and colors for each psalm, a miniature for each page, and a small painting at the bottom of each column of text. Then after sketching in his decorations for 23 more pages, this skillful illuminator died under circumstances unknown to history.

Last week Brother Tikytt's psalter appeared in Manhattan as a principal item in an auction of the library of the Marquess of Lothian at the American Art Association Anderson Galleries, Inc. Not in two decades, it was claimed, had such an important sale of manuscripts and incunabula occurred in the U. S.

Bidding on the Tikytt psalter began at $20,000 and rose rapidly to $61,000, for which it was bought by plump little Dr. Abraham S. Wolf Rosenbach of Philadelphia, who usually manages to skim off the cream, of most U. S. book auctions.

Rarer, though a shade less precious than the Tikytt psalter, were the Blickling Homilies, only Anglo-Saxon manuscript in the U. S., a volume of 149 vellum pages written by two scribes about 971. For it Barnet J. Beyer, Manhattan bookdealer, paid $55,000. For $45,000 he also got what was described as "the most important early illustrated book ever sold at auction"--Boccaccio's De La Ruine des Nobles hommes et femmes. Translated by Pierre Faivre, it was the first dated book (1476) with copperplate illustrations. Disposal of the Boccaccio was complicated by the competition of an anonymous collector in Muncie, Ind., whose bids, up to $40,000, were made by long distance telephone and read to the gallery by a Negro page.

First night's prices, $356,260 for 89 lots, so encouraged agents of the Marquess of Lothian that they considered it likely that he would send to the U. S. for sale a collection of fine furniture and paintings from his two estates, Blickling Hall, Norfolk, and Newbattle Abbey, Midlothian. The Marquess is better known to U. S. citizens as Philip Henry Kerr, lecturer and onetime private secretary to David Lloyd George. He was a member of last summer's Round Table Conferences on India. Second cousin to the Duke of Norfolk, he succeeded to his title last March at the death of his first cousin, the tenth Marquess. Last week's sale of his library was largely necessitated by heavy taxes on the estates which he had inherited with his title.

Second night of the sale, devoted to minor items, was interrupted by the disposal of one major item of Americana which came, not from the Lothian library, but from that of George Charles Wentworth Fitzwilliam. of Milton, Peterborough, England. Addressed "to the KINGS most excellent majesty," this musty sheaf of papers has had a career so interesting that most U. S. collectors value it second only to the Declaration of Independence.* Written in a neat spidery hand which is almost certainly that of John Dickenson of Pennsylvania, it was the final petition to George III by the American Colonies to right their wrongs. Drawn up and signed by 46 members of the Second Continental Congress on July 8, 1775 (after Concord, Lexington, Bunker Hill), it had been confided to the care of Richard Penn who on Sept. 1 presented it to Lord Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the Colonies. Lord Dartmouth presumably made an unsuccessful effort to show it to the King. He reported: "As his majesty did not receive it [the petition] on the throne, no answer will be given." What Edmund Burke later described as "a very decent and manly petition from the Congress" then found its way into the care of William, 2nd Earl Fitzwilliam, who scribbled on its back, "Petition of American Congress to the King" and let it rest at Milton Hall. There his great grandson found it last year. A duplicate of this "Olive Branch" petition, with three more signatures, lies in the London Public Record Office.

Last week's sale of the "Olive Branch," only signed copy in the U. S., set a new price record for a single item of Americana./- After spirited competition with A. Edward Newton. Charles Sessler of Philadelphia, and Alwin J. Scheuer of New York, who ran the price to $52,000, Gabriel Wells, Manhattan collector and dealer whose Americana is one of the most important in the U. S., bought it for $53,000. Said he: "That will go directly into my safe. You can depend on that."

On Location

Fat, grizzled, 72-year-old Childe Hassam is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the holder of innumerable prizes beginning with a medal from the 1892 Paris Exposition. He may not be the foremost painter in the U. S., but he is certainly the foremost painter of East Hampton, L. I., where he has a fine summer house and a solarium in which he last year offered to wrestle or box with disrespectful commentators. His wealth, position and appearance well qualified Painter Hassam to be the first subject of a series of short one or two reel cinemas, made and released by Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art, to preserve for history the technique, idiosyncrasies and recreational habits of leading U. S. artists.

Renting at $2.50 per reel for domestic projectors, or $5 for commercial machines, forthcoming Metropolitan movies will exhibit Painter Frank Weston Benson, smoking a pipe, and Painter Lawrence Saint, making a stained glass window for the Washington Cathedral. First of the series, released last week, exhibited Painter Hassam beginning his day as befits a rich, successful and not yet superannuated artist, by dictating letters to his pretty secretary, Virginia Rook, who is also his grandniece. Later Painter Hassam is seen showing some sketches to his wife, swimming at Southampton's Maidstone Club, whacking at a golf ball in a sand trap, painting the kind of old sun-dappled house he likes best to put on canvas. As a climax he inspects with urbane but irrepressible enthusiasm some of his own paintings hanging in the Metropolitan.

Covarrubias in Bali

The 1,000,000 natives of the Dutch East Indian island of Bali are lazy, rich, amenable, clever. Their soil is so fertile that they can raise three crops a year with almost no effort. They divide their spare time between the practice of the arts (music, dancing, sculpture) and the practice of eccentric rites, such as building wooden statues to serve as decoys for devils. Balinese music influenced Debussy. Balinese dancers inspired that able U. S. dancer, Ruth Page (TIME, Nov. 25, 1929). Even before Hickman Powell's travel book, The Last Paradise, Bali was on its way toward becoming the latest and most approved resting spot for tired occidental esthetes. Further confirmation of the vogue for Bali was supplied last week when Mexican Caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias exhibited in Manhattan drawings which he made in Bali last winter.

The drawings of Caricaturist Covarrubias were gay and excitable footnotes in praise of the exotic. He had been impressed by the huge circular earrings affected by Balinese ladies, the costumes of dancing girls, their fans and lavish headgear. His line drawings, particularly one of two dancers called Legong, were graceful and more colorful than his paintings, which had the air of East Indian fashion plates. With pardonable bias, Muralist Diego Rivera, for whom Covarrubias once lugged water jugs in Mexico City, said: "Covarrubias has now reached the age at which a man's face occasionally becomes overcast and in which his work grows in profundity."

*The only known official copy of the original Declaration of Independence in the Library of Congress is in the possession of Dr. Rosenbach. Properly certified, it was sent to Frederick the Great of Prussia through Benjamin Franklin in 1777.

/-Old record: $51,000 which Dr. Rosenbach paid for a Button Gwinnet letter in 1927.

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