English in Paris

So culturally self-sufficient are the French that important exhibitions of foreign art are rare in Paris. Rare in particular are shows of English art, toward which Parisians have a traditional, polite contempt. But by an interesting coincidence, the proposed visit of the King & Queen of England to Paris this June is being preceded by two unusually large and official shows of English painting. Last month Parisians fought a preliminary bout with their insularity at an exhibition of Caricatures et Moeurs Anglaises, 1750-1850 at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs. And last week at the Louvre, in the presence of the entire diplomatic corps and a select audience of French notables, President Albert Lebrun opened the first comprehensive show of English art ever held in France.

The exhibition of caricatures was organized by a new Franco-British Association of Art et Tourisme, sponsored by Their Excellencies the British and French Ambassadors, and numbering among its active officers Anglophile Andre Maurois. Frenchmen, who are still fond enough of Daumier and Grandville (TIME, Nov. 8) to use their drawings in modern advertisements, got plenty of fun out of their English predecessors and contemporaries, Hogarth, Rowlandson, Gillray, Cruikshank et al., represented by 391 sketches, engravings and lithographs. But this was only a foretaste of the grandeurs to come.

Since an act of Parliament in 1935, it has been permissible for works from the British national collections to go on loan abroad. Last week's exhibition, however, was the first outside of England to which the National Gallery, the Tate Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum have contributed their finest paintings. The King, moreover, made a unique exception in allowing loans from the Royal collections. To this generosity the French responded by clearing five great rooms in the Louvre and restoring them to the splendor of the 16th and 17th Centuries. Insured for a total of $15,000,000, heavily guarded by Scotland Yard, 150 choice paintings and some 200 water colors and drawings were shipped from England, many of them by air, to be hung in state at the heart of France.

Until the end of May, visitors to the Louvre will have the chance of a lifetime to taste the cream of three centuries of English talent. The paintings begin with Hogarth's famed Shrimp Girl and end with the soundly inspired work of Genre-Painter Walter Sickert, Landscapist Philip Wilson Steer, Portraitist Augustus John. Nothing controversial, nothing new mars the orderly display of masterwork. But in Reynolds' and Gainsborough's stately figures, Constable's English clouds and countryside, Turner's light, Blake's line and Rossetti's pattern, most Frenchmen last week found a powerful concentration of evidence that the English have not been without their Art.

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