Muscle & Shadow

John Raltenbury Skeaping never went to an ordinary school or college, it being his father's conviction that children wasted their time learning things in school which they could master in a few months after growing up. His father was a painter, his mother a pianist. When he was three years old, John began to draw horses and fanciful animals; when he was seven, his father started him to work with oils. He trotted for miles over the Essex countryside following farm horses, watching the jounce and ripple of muscle, the play of light on sweaty hide.

When he was nine, he took to arguing with his father about art and his mother started teaching him music. His sisters went off to London to study ballet dancing, and John decided to go too. He danced doggedly for two years, gave it up because the students were forbidden to ride bicycles or horses. Back in art school he switched from painting to sculpture because he liked the physical exertion of carving. At 17, he decided he was old enough to enlist in the British Army but that year the War ended. He left home, got along for ten years on a continuous succession of scholarships. As a student in Rome he lived in a thieves' den. In Naples he was nearly murdered. In 1927 he felt that his career was launched at last when a handful of important people came to his first show.

Opened this week at Manhattan's Walker Galleries was the first U. S. exhibition of John Skeaping's animal drawings. In almost all these the focus of Skeaping's interest is the interplay of muscle and shadow. On view were an infuriated elephant, with eyes bulging out of its head; grave, long-fingered, acrobatic monkeys; a Dartmoor pony standing in ferns that look like fossil prints; an old Zebu bull with mountainous shoulders; a leopard which is almost pure draftsmanship without substance. A formalized antelope reminded visitors of the wall drawings of Cro-Magnon cave men. A group of storks and herons seemed to be millions of years old, to show atavistic traces of reptilian ancestry.

At 36, John Skeaping considers himself an expert horseman, a fair fisherman, spends one day a week at the race tracks if he can. Twice married, he has a son by his first wife, whom he divorced in 1933. He is chief instructor of the London County Council's school of animal drawing just opened at the London Zoo.

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