Girl

The operating room is silent except for the clink of instruments on the porcelain-topped table and the voice of the surgeon, muffled through a gauze mouth bandage, calling sharply for instruments. A bronchoscope, a long mirrored tube, is inserted in the patient's throat and a rod bearing a tiny electric light bulb dropped down. From the sidelines a slender figure muffled in gauze darts forward to squint for perhaps half a minute down the bronchoscope, then back to her sketching pad and color box to draw as quickly as possible the infected tonsils, the tumor, or whatever it is that is being operated on. The next morning she will hand over to the surgeon for his hospital files accurately colored drawings of infected areas that could not easily be photographed, before and after the operation, with additional diagrams showing various steps in the operation, stitching, drainage. Last week the searchlight of the Manhattan art world turned briefly on the young woman who has been making hundreds of these medical drawings for the past three years: Muriel Robinson.

Painter Robinson was born in Westbrook, Me., home town of Hubert Prior "Rudy" Vallee, whom she has never met. Student at the Boston Museum at the age of 17, she was one of few girls to complete the late Instructor Philip Leslie Hale's notoriously stiff anatomy course. In New York, generally working with Dr. Roland Grausman, she has specialized in sketches of diseased bronchial tracts. But Miss Robinson has her softer side.

A shapely young woman of 24 with large brown eyes, she earns most of her living making pastel sketches of pouting theatrical beauties for theatre lobbies. In Boston her talents were first discovered by the undergraduates of Harvard.

"I used to sell sketches," said she last week, "nothing pornographic you understand, but I have always been interested in the human figure and I did girls in little panties--I guess there isn't a dormitory in Cambridge that hasn't some of my work."

Recently the World Telegram's reporter (female) recorded the following dialog:

"What I look for in the subjects I paint is sex appeal. . . . I see it in an abandoned posture of the body, in lips that are relaxed and never tense and in hair that is informally arranged. . . . I wish I could see some New York men glamorous enough. . . . I am on the lookout for them all the time but every time I come to New York it seems to me that the male population looks less picturesque. I think of New York mainly as a good place to lose weight. . . ."

Within a week of this interview's publication Artist Robinson received over 100 letters. The first one she opened began:

"Dear Muriel: I am a handsome young cowboy of the Western Plains. . . ."

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