Portrait Agency

Unlike the pictures that hang on the walls of other Manhattan galleries, 460 Park Avenue's portraits are not for sale. They are samples. Each sample is by a different portrait painter. Most of 460 Park Avenue's clients are bank presidents, business executives, hotel managers, or fond family folk who want a portrait of husband, wife or child. By looking over Mmes. Shaw & Duplaix's samples, they can decide which artist is their dish. Prices range from $50 (for a drawing job by Portraitist Hester Merwin) to $7,000 (for a high-class likeness, John Sargent style, by famed Society Painter Charles Hopkinson). For each job it gets them, 460 Park Avenue charges its artists a 33 1/3 % commission.

Last week 460 Park Avenue added another artist to its stable: a tiny, rusty-haired, Austrian-born portrait painter named Clara Klinghoffer. To give Artist Klinghoffer a good sendoff, 460 Park Avenue spruced up one of its best rooms, put on a show of 28 paintings and drawings, including portraits of such notables as Tenor Sergei Radamsky, tunbellied Author Hendrik Willem van Loon. For a portraitist with such a good address, Painter Klinghoffer is medium-priced, will do a muscled, Michelangelesque drawing for $60, a Rembrandtesque oil for $650. An expert at accurate anatomy and spitting imagery, Artist Klinghoffer has been working with charcoal, pen and pencil ever since she can remember. Says she, with a London-influenced Austrian accent: "I drew like that before I ever sore any old masters."

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