Emigr

When the Pennsylvania Museum of Art had its big Daumier show last autumn (TIME, Nov. 8), 14 of the largest and most valuable oils exhibited were listed as the property of "An Anonymous Lender." Few Philadelphians knew that after the exhibitions these paintings went right back into the Museum's storage rooms as part of a $1,000,000 collection of paintings shipped from Paris last year to be held there on "indefinite loan." The lender, still anonymous, is not the only European collector who has recently found it expedient to store his art elsewhere. Last week the Pennsylvania Museum placed on exhibition some 50 late Renoirs never before seen in the U. S., lent for indefinite storage by rich, 34-year-old Philippe Gangnat of Paris.

Among the familiar evidences of European foreboding, this quiet emigration of paintings to Philadelphia ranks as a minor but interesting portent. Both loans were arranged by the Pennsylvania Museum's young, socialite Assistant Curator Henry Plumer Mcllhenny. Young Mr. McIlhenny was tipped off to the nervousness of young M. Gangnat last summer in

Paris. He quickly closed a bargain by which the ten-year-old, still unfinished and partly empty Pennsylvania Museum would store the famed Gangnat Renoirs free, with the privilege of exhibiting them when it pleased. Slender, black-eyed M. Gangnat took the opportunity of visiting the U. S. and last week was in Manhattan on his way to Hollywood.

Philippe Gangnat's father, Maurice, made his money in steel, took no interest in painting until 1903. In that year he met Pierre Auguste Renoir, bought twelve paintings right off the bat and soon became a fast friend of the old painter. Before the artist died in 1919, Steelmaster Gangnat had accumulated no less than 150 paintings in the softly-modeled, peach-bloom style of Renoir's later years. After Maurice Gangnat's death in 1924, his son let all but 50 paintings go at an auction. The fineness of the 50 last week impressed the Pennsylvania Museum's severest critic, Dr. Albert Coombs Barnes of Marion, Pa., who himself owns the most magnificent Renoirs in the U. S. Setting foot within the museum for the first time since he began to picket it, (TIME, Nov. 29), Dr. Barnes warmed up enough to point out with admiration such of Renoir's children's portraits as Enfant `a Cuiller (see cut).

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