The Barrister & the Beauties

Baltimore Bachelor Alfred Jenkins Shriver was a legal expert who prided himself on his skill with wills and his eye for beauty. He left behind, after his death in 1939, a dilly of a will to prove both points of pride. Not counting 235 bottles of scotch, 165 bottles of champagne, 15 gallons of pure alcohol and one bottle "of Howard County applejack (all of which went down the drain to avoid tax complications), he left a round $900,000 to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, to build Shriver Hall of materials "the best obtainable in the world." And he tied his bequest down with stipulations that made it to his confreres "one of the most remarkable documents of our time."

Benefactor Shriver's idea of how his early 19th century Georgian brick memorial should be decorated turned out to require the services of half a dozen artists and sculptors. On view last week was the largest item of all: a 640-sq. ft. mural for the main lobby, made up of panels depicting the early faculty of the Medical School, the early faculty of Johns Hopkins, philanthropists of Baltimore, the picture of Shriver's class of 1891 and a deep, cotillion bow from Bachelor Shriver to The Ten Famous Beauties of Baltimore, each shown "at the height of her beauty."

To paint the mural, involving a total of 120-odd figures, Johns Hopkins commissioned Painter Leon Kroll, 71, famed as "dean of U.S. nude-painters," who labored 2 1/2 years on the task. Unquestioned hit of the series, and for Muralist Kroll ("I like women better than men") a labor of love, are the Baltimore belles. To record them, Kroll started with nude models (see cut), then borrowed or bought authentic turn-of-the-century gowns, used photographs and Baltimorites' recollections to recapture the exact features and coloring of the originals.

Kroll frankly admits that "the nude studies might have shocked the ladies if they had been alive" (only one of them is: handsome, octogenarian Mrs. De Courcy Wright Thorn of Baltimore), but he points out, "That way I could capture the movement of the body better, the fall of the legs and breasts." For Kroll, who holds that "the human body is the most beautiful thing in the world," painting clothes on the nudes was the reluctant, if necessary, next step. The finished painting shows half an instep, no ankle. The result turned the bacchanal into a proper tea party on the lawn before Johns Hopkins' old "Homewood House," which was probably just what Bachelor Shriver had in mind all along.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.