Manhattan Mahatma

This year's enthusiasm for U. S. painting and its founders moved forward in New York last week with two memorial exhibitions. One, at the Metropolitan Museum of the portraits and landscapes of Samuel Finley Breese Morse, commemorated the 100th anniversary of the telegraph. One, at the Public Library of the amazing wood engravings of Timothy Cole, famed craftsman of the '90s, recalled the days-before-photo-engraving.* Critics left them unvisited until they had paid their respects to the first showing in years of the painting of the Mahatma Eilshemius.

All Manhattan art dealers know a little old gentleman with baggy trousers, a beard and a beady eye who is the city's most persistent exhibition visitor. All of them know that he is Louis Michel Eilshemius M. A., by his own admission painter, poet, musician, inventor, marksman, and "Ex Fancy Amateur Dancer." He loves to buttonhole strangers in hallways and describe his own superior accomplishments. He was once wealthy. He is still listed in the Social Register, lives in a brownstone house on East 57th Street and has spent a fortune on strange pamphlets and books to prove that Elshemus or Eilshemius (the spelling varies) is the greatest artist the world has ever known. Eilshemius also states that Eilshemius has written music, invented a portable piano and a game known as "Sixers"' (like pinochle) and adopted the title, Mahatma.

But the Mahatma Eilshemius is by no means a charlatan. He has been called the American Rousseau. His childish, sentimental painting has been described as "the type of thing . . . which would result were the rank and file of Americans capable of expressing themselves on canvas." He has been praised by Henri Matisse and dozens of others. His most important pictures have been bought by the three most astute collections of modern U. S. paintings: Whitney Museum, Phillips Memorial Gallery (Washington), Mr. & Mrs. Chester Dale.

Not for an instant has the Mahatma Eilshemius ceased to shout his scorn of every other painter in the world, his disdain of every art gallery that does not recognize the importance of his work. But he stopped painting in 1920. A few have suspected that he realized then that his pictures of Samoa, his ruins by moonlight, his strange nude ladies bathing in improbable streams were as far as he could go. Last week he grew suddenly frank with his press agent. "I won't paint again," said Louis Eilshemius, "I'm just a comedian."

*Before the introduction of photo-engraving the U. S. illustrated magazines (Scribner's, Harper's, Century) employed a group of U. S. wood-block engravers of unmatched dexterity. They copied oil paintings, photographs, etchings, drawings. To the day of his death gaunt irascible Joseph Pennell urged their recognition by serious art critics. Most of them were of German descent. Timothy Cole, ablest, best-known, was British-born.

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