Young Americana

Fashionable art previews in Manhattan bring ladies and gentlemen together for cocktails. In Chicago, they bring ladies together for tea. Last week such an affair at Chicago's Quest Art Galleries stimulated socialite previewers to start a fresh artistic fad.

Collected last spring by enterprising Edith Gregor Halpert of Manhattan's Downtown Gallery, the Quest show was called "Children in American Folk Art, 1725-1865." Patrons included Mr. & Mrs. Robert Maynard Hutchins and other good Chicagoans. In one room were portraits of children by journeymen painters of the early 19th Century. In another were 45 paintings done by children between 1800 and 1861. Quest rooms on the second floor contained pictures by contemporary artists of the Chicago Public Schools. Chicago ladies found this combination of historical, local, esthetic and sentimental interests so irresistible that they bought paintings right & left--$45 to $750 for the old, $2 to $15 for the new.

Before the Civil War, water color painting and painting on velvet came next after samplers in the accomplishments of proper little women. No adult productions reflect as limpidly as theirs the ironbound sobriety of that period. Among examples shown last week were an able Baptisam of our Savour by Ann Johnson, age unknown, and five "mourning pictures"-- families standing at tombs overhung with weeping willows. Inscriptions: "The Grass Witherith, the Flower Fadeth, and the Hopes of Man is Destroyed"; "Our Dying Friends are Pioneers to Smooth our Rugged Pass to Death."

Little girl escapists who put their imaginations to more cheerful use turned out pictures of landscapes inspired by romantic literature: Dunbarton Castle, The Lady of the Lake, A View in Asia. Boys who seldom went in for velvet or water colors got their chance at art in "steel pen exercises" in colored ink, supposed to help penmanship. Subjects varied from Napoleon on Horseback to Kittens at Play. "Fractur" painting with quill pens and homemade colors, a survival of medieval illumination which flourished among the Pennsylvania Germans, had at least one child virtuoso in William Henry Oberholtzer, who was in school in 1861. He drew his painstaking pictures of Julius Caesar, a stage coach, an Indian chief in his copy book (see cut) between exercises such as 300 lines of "Is intemperance a greater evil than slavery?"

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