Penn Museum

"This marks the end of provincialism in Philadelphia. . . . The city has always been devoted to higher things, living in the light of culture, but in the past there has been no centre of culture in Philadelphia. . . . The city culturally has been a family without a hearthstone. . . ." These were the words of onetime (1922-27) U. S. Senator George Wharton Pepper; the hearthstone to which he referred was the Pennsylvania Museum of Art, at whose dedication he was making a speech. The new museum stands above the Schuylkill River, on a spot once tenanted by factories and tenements; here it had been envisaged 20 years ago by John E. Reyburn, then mayor of Philadelphia. Ten of its galleries had been completed at a total cost of about $10,000,000, and these, together with ten "period" rooms carefully removed from old houses and reassembled in the museum, were last week opened to the public.

For its opening show, the Pennsylvania Museum exhibited several loan collections of an interesting but not startling nature. It will require many years before the magnificent edifice, built upon Greek lines out of polychromatic stones, can secure paintings which justify either its exterior or the panegyrics lavished upon it by onetime Senator Pepper and Philadelphian news-sheets.