Versailles in Manhattan

One of the biggest, most elaborate and most thoroughly forgotten paintings in American history is heading for a comeback. A 165-ft. panorama of the palace and gardens at Versailles, painted in two CinemaScope-like sections, it is being installed this week in a specially built circular room in Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum. Versailles is a masterwork of sobersided, redheaded John Vanderlyn (1775-1852), a painter deeply admired in his youth, deeply pitied in old age, and deeply buried in the textbooks after his death. The picture's new home at the Met should do much to rescue Painter Vanderlyn from his long oblivion.

Among his early distinctions, Vanderlyn was the first American painter to conquer naked flesh. Actually, he had small choice in the matter; his patron, Aaron Burr, decided it by sending him to Paris instead of London for training. The earnest student from Kingston, N.Y. struck the French capital in 1796, when Jacques-Louis David and his neoclassic followers were preparing the stage for Napoleon's posturings. Trapped in the doctrinaire icebox of neoclassicism, Vanderlyn conscientiously set about acquiring its basic asset: figure drawing. He also acquired its defects: stale colors and chill poses.

Medal from Napoleon. Vanderlyn befriended his compatriot painter, Washington Allston, when both were visiting Rome. Their brush with the remains of the Renaissance encouraged both young hopefuls to try to paint great pictures instead of settling for good ones. Result: both sprinted too far too soon, and had to sit out their later years. Vanderlyn tasted glory first, when his grandiose Marius Amid the Ruins of Carthage caught Napoleon's eye. "Give the medal to that!" the Emperor ordered; overnight the American became a cynosure at the French court. When Aaron Burr came penniless to France after his trial for treason, Vanderlyn was able to repay Burr's former generosity in full, supporting his patron as he himself had been supported.

All that was needed to complete Vanderlyn's good fortune was a New York reputation to match the fame he enjoyed in Paris. He returned in 1815, confidently bearing with him the pictures Paris had admired. Among them was the slickest nude yet painted by an American, a solid, polished essay in sensuality, made respectable, he hoped, by its title: Ariadne. But Ariadne shocked his staid American contemporaries, who denounced the picture as an example of European depravity.

One Peppercorn for Rent. Vanderlyn cheerfully produced another string to his bow; he had brought back detailed perspective drawings of Versailles, which he now proposed to work up into an oil panorama. His admirers were so taken by this idea that they raised money to build Manhattan's first art museum building, specifically to house the painting. It was a neoclassic, circular structure, a few steps from City Hall, on ground rented from the city for one peppercorn a year. Vanderlyn's panorama occupied the whole upstairs, his smaller canvases, which he thought finer, were downstairs. Entrance fees were supposed to pay for maintenance, but hardly anyone came.

Taken over by creditors, the building eventually became a criminal court. Versailles itself was exhibited in various cities, never successfully, and once served as a theater backdrop. Cut in pieces at last, it was stored rolled up in the attic of the old New York State Senate House at Kingston, from which the Metropolitan rescued it.

Spring & Fall. With the panorama's commercial failure, Vanderlyn had used up most of his luck. And since his was one of those tender talents that blossom only in the sun, his force declined with his fortune. Hearing of Allston's death in 1843, Vanderlyn wrote: "When I look back some five or six and thirty years since when we were both in Rome together and next-door neighbors on the Trinita del Monte, and in the spring of life, full of enthusiasm for our art and fancying fair prospects awaiting us in after years, it is painful to reflect how far these hopes have been from being realized."

Vanderlyn's last years grew ever more bitter and obscure -a slow, sore fading away into history's attic, from which he is only now again emerging.

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