Bought

There was not a whisper in the gallery. They had it all to themselves. Outside, the grey skies of Northamptonshire cast a twilight about the old house, blurring the trees that lined the avenue up which no one came. Everyone else, indeed, had gone long ago, but still they stayed--beauties, wits, gallants, a decent sheet pulled over the face of each in the silence and shadow of the voiceless gallery.

It is not probable that they knew that their owner, Earl Spencer, had died; but even if they did, they could not have understood. Death, for those who derive their being from the paint of Master Artists, is a phenomenon hardly less comprehensible than change. Yet there was the fact, the Earl was dead and change was upon them. All this in 1922.

Last week, came the announcement that Duveen Bros., famed London dealers, had bought six of them--three Reynoldses, a Gainsborough, a Van Dyke, a Frans Hals--for a sum said to approximate $1,500,000.* The portraits would be shipped to the U. S. "soon," said the Duveens.

Most famed of all this group that dreamed so long in the Northamptonshire house is Sir Joshua Reynolds' portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire. She stands against a marble balustrade, a flight of steps at her feet leading to a formal park. Her dress is cream colored, her coif, built up like a Chestertonian paragraph, is starred with pearls, garnished with plumes of red and grey; from her right arm depends a gauzy scarf. Walpole wrote of her: "She effaces all without being a beauty, but her youthful figure, lively modesty and modest familiarity make her a prodigy." The portrait was painted at the time of her wedding. Seven years later, she sat to Gainsborough, and his portrait of her shows a woman whose face had taken on a pensive cast and her body a buxom rotundity--not quite so buxom, on the tactful canvas, as her contemporaries are known to have found her./-

Frans Hals is represented in this group by his Portrait of a Man--a Cavalier in a rakish hat, white ruff, glancing over his shoulder. Hals reproduced this gentleman's debonair carriage, reproduced also, in delicate red, the warts that marred his countenance.

Van Dyke's Daedalus and Icarus betrays the influence of Rubens. The choice of subject, the richness of hues, the transparency of the shadows, all are in the Rubens tradition. Reynolds has two other canvases in this collection--one of Lady Spencer and her son Viscount Althorp, playing with a black and white cocker-spaniel; one of the Marchioness Camden, seated with a naively histrionic air, upon the ground.

* This price was later spoken of as "grossly exaggerated."

/-Wrote a critic in the St. James's Chronicle: "A very elegant picture of the Duchess of Devonshire, who in our opinion is by no means an elegant woman,"