Twenty-five Years After

Prosperous Portraitist Paul Chabas, 66, summoned reporters to his Paris studio last week to kill one news story and make another. He had just finished a portrait of Mrs. Walter E. Edge, wife of President Hoover's Ambassador to France. It was not, however, that work that he wanted to talk about but the most famed picture he ever painted--September Morn.

Rumors starting he knew not where insisted that the original model for the painting was now starving in a garret. Artist Chabas had suddenly been deluged with letters from the U. S. demanding to know what had happened to her, offering to send money, clothes, food.

"I do hope that you will dispel the rumor that 'September Morn' now is living in poverty," said he last week. "She isn't. She is 41 now, and alas, she is no longer as slender as when she posed for me. She is happily married to a wealthy French industrialist and has three lovely children. I cannot tell her name because she does not want to be embarrassed with remembrances of the days when she posed in the nude. . . . She was only 16 when I first started the picture. ... I think I succeeded in capturing her delicate charm. She was exactly like the picture. . . ."

The summers of 1910 and 1911 Artist Chabas, who had been exhibiting with the Salon since 1885, spent by the chilly borders of Lake Annecy in the French Savoie, not far from Switzerland. Whenever the mornings were warm and clear enough, he would go down to the lake shore at 8:30 a. m. with his slender, blonde model. She would strip off her clothes, stand ankle deep in the icy water in a pose that the whole world knows. A slow meticulous worker, Artist Chabas would paint for only 30 minutes, then knock off until the next good morning. When the canvas was finished by the end of the second summer, he called it Matinee de Septembre and sent it to the Salon of 1912 where it won a medal of honor and very little public attention. Hunting for a purchaser, Artist Chabas shipped it to the U. S. art firm of Braun & Co., then on West 46th St., Manhattan. It almost certainly would never have been known as more than a good piece of sentimental painting were it not for a famed Manhattan reformer.

In May 1913, white-whiskered officious old Anthony Comstock was strolling along 46th Street in Manhattan when he was halted in his tracks by the shocking sight of the original painting of September Morn boldly displayed in the front window of Braun & Co. Into the shop he stormed, displayed his police badge, ordered a salesman named James Kelly to take the picture out of the window.

"There's too little morning, and too much maid!" roared Anthony Comstock. "Take her out!"

The gallery refused. Next morning the story flamed all over the front pages of Manhattan, and crowds were blocking the sidewalk before Braun & Co. The rest is history. Reproductions of September Morn burgeoned on calendars, candy boxes, cigars, suspenders, post cards. An anonymous couplet swept the land: Please do not think I'm bad or bold, But where it's deep it's awful cold. And whenever the excitement seemed likely to die out there were always rival Comstocks in provincial cities ready to blast the picture all over again.

Artist Chabas took his picture back to Paris and promptly sold it to a rich Russian collector named Leon Mantacheff for $10,000. Through the Russian Revolution it remained in Moscow, then mysteriously disappeared. If it has been destroyed, if it exists in some little known Soviet museum or decorates a Commissar's private office, Artist Chabas would dearly like to know.

"Although several fortunes have been made from my picture," said he last week, "nobody was thoughtful enough to send me even a box of cigars."

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