Something for Nothing

One good reason why artists are notoriously impecunious is that pictures are notoriously hard to sell. Last week a venerable, famed (and comfortably off) British artist announced that he had found a way out: he gives his pictures away. As a solver of financial problems, Sir Frank Brangwyn seemed to fellow artists reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's White Knight, who thought up a scheme "to keep the Menai Bridge from rust by boiling it in wine."

Seventy-six-year-old Artist Brangwyn has already, said he, disposed of some $500,000 worth of his art. Most Brangwyn gifts have gone quietly to friends and fans, because he hates having his work "pawed over by a lot of strangers."

Long a mainstay of Britain's ultraconservative Royal Academy, Artist Brangwyn is best known in the U.S. for his arch-academic murals in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center (R.C.A. Building's lobby). Sir Frank once fell afoul of British womanhood when he was misreported as having criticized the British female figure. What he actually said: "An Eve--I want an Eve. Where is there an Eve symbolic of her sex?" Result: a mass demonstration of shapely women in the streets of his native village (Ditchling, Sussex).

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